When Rhinos Do Yoga
by Riverdancekat09
Summary: ...you're helpless to do anything but grab the popcorn and watch. Select sections of "I Have No Idea How the Rhinoceros Got There" from Fenris's point of view, just for fun. Rated T for language, may bump up to M in the future. **Not regularly updated**
1. An Arrival

The coarse sand was hot beneath soles of his feet, damp and sticky with spilled blood. He breathed deeply through his nose; he tried to find a rhythm that would push through the mounting soreness in his limbs as his blade tore through foe after foe _after foe_. He flashed the lyrium—_again_—and nearly bit through the inside of his cheek as the ache-burn-freeze pumped through him. _Fuck_.

Fenris was _exhausted_.

Not just of _this_. Though it certainly didn't help, he admitted wryly to himself, as his two-handed sword bit through the face of a snarling marauder wielding an axe twice as big as he was. But he was, simply put, tired of _this_.

He had sustained himself with the food and fire of hatred for close to three years now. He had sustained himself with vivid daydreams in which he plunged a glowing fist into Danarius's chest. _He's still out there_ was a mantra, a prayer, an oath he would keep. But _He's still out there _rang wearily hollow, when weighed against the louder clamor of _I'm still here_.

_I'm still here _meant killing while he killed time. _I'm still here _meant the bottom of a bottle in his pilfered mansion that still reeked of blood, death and filth. _I'm still here _meant days and nights of veering between apathy and paranoia. _I'm still here _meant mercenary work he enjoyed even less than _this_, just to keep himself fed. _I'm still here _meant Hanged Man and companions he'd had no say in choosing and acquiescing to Hawke's bizarre desire to teach him to read just to pass the time because _Old Gods and fury _he was so fucking _bored_—

He stumbled; swore without putting very much venom behind it. The mage who led the marauders—Fenris had already forgotten his name, dismissed as unimportant next to _mage _and _I'm still here_—leered triumphantly. Lightning sparked bluish-purple in the space between his hands, and Fenris braced himself. This was going to—

The markings absorbed most of the actual _power _behind the mage's attack; he could shrug it aside, could continue his fight. But it still _hurt_. Tears blurred his vision as the electric shock reverberated in his bones. The bloody sand shifted between his toes, and he slipped. For the second time in as many minutes—seconds?—he stumbled. _Venhedis_.

A second strike of chain lightning hit him squarely in the chest. The lyrium in his skin flexed weakly—strange that he almost always thought of it as an extra muscle—and ultimately buckled. The impact seemed to rip holes in the air around him, as his bare feet danced clumsily backwards. The sounds of battle grew eerily, dangerously distant. His sword slipped from his grasp. Darkness closed over him; he loathed himself utterly for feeling _relieved_, and began an earnest resistance, too late.

_So this is it—_

A low growl of warning. A wordless exclamation, quickly stifled. A thump. A muffled rattle.

Fenris groaned—part grateful, part disappointed, part _this really hurts_—as the new sounds tugged him back from the brink. He lay cushioned face first on something soft—_too __soft_. The air around him was cool on his skin—_too __cool_. Goose bumps shivered across his markings, and he took a deep breath to fortify himself against the pounding ache at the base of his skull—_smell __what is that smell where am I—_

His senses finally stitched the essentials of his awareness together. He didn't know where he was. He wasn't alone.

Fenris sprang to his feet, landing on a hard floor he could tell was cleaner than any found in Kirkwall. _Strange _surrounded him: a sofa upholstered in some worn material stuck between blue and black; a sturdy wooden table that sat too close to the ground to be of any use for eating; papers and books on shelves, a flat black square whose purpose he could not begin to divine atop a chest of drawers, cups, plates squares circles angles _wrong wrong all wrong_ _he didn't know where he WAS—_

_ He wasn't alone. _

Fenris whirled, one hand already reaching for the hilt of his broadsword except his broadsword wasn't there his sheath was empty _oh Maker I'm unarmed I don't know where I am—_

_I'm not alone_.

The woman pressed her back against the edge of a second table as though she could disappear into it, staring at him with a mixture of confusion, fright, and outright incredulity. Loose clothing draped her in folds of soft bulk that made it impossible to gauge her strength, or even her build. Her expression was slack, her bright eyes wide with shock behind a pair of oval spectacles, but the shape of her chin and forehead suggested a catlike, gamine face. A slow, hesitant smile—_who __the fuck SMILES in a situation like this?_—tugged her mouth upwards by its corners. One pale hand dropped to her side, rested on the head of a blue-and-black hound mottled like a court fool. It twitched like a nervous spider, as she opened her mouth. "Hi," she greeted him.

The word cracked through the silence. His markings flashed of their own volition, as rage seared through him-rage and confusion and fear burned away the lingering agony of the mage's attacks. He scythed forward, swift and sure of foot, and bent her backwards over her table as he gripped her by the throat. "What have you done to me?" he demanded.

Her eyes bulged as she choked past his grasp, "_Please—please let go—"_

"_What have you done to me?!" _ he roared. Panic—hot, hysterical panic tightened his grip. Blood trickled down her pale skin in tiny rivulets. Her fearful gasps tickled his fingers through his clawed gauntlets. He barely heard her hound, baying at him in challenge. He barely felt the frantic scratching of her fingernails on his near-incorporeal skin, barely noticed her moving at all—

Something cold and vaguely slimy splashed into his face, and he released her in surprise and disgust. She scampered away, pulling a chair between them with one hand while the other nursed her abused throat. "Scooter, _down_," she snapped shakily to the hound, who was still barking from a nearby doorway into another room. "For Chrissake shut _up_."

There was a small scuffle while she groped for the dog's collar without taking her eyes off of him. Liquid dripped from his hair, smelling of something bitter, and he shook his head to keep it from getting into his eyes. She tugged nervously on her sleeves, teeth worrying at her bottom lip in apparent indecision. She tore a square of white paper that felt like cloth from a cylinder that had rolled into the chair she currently used as a shield, and held it out to him. "Sorry about that," she offered with a wan, polite smile. "The bathroom's just through there, if you'd like to wash up."

_Scooter. Sorry. Bathroom_. Fenris wondered if he might be going mad, as he stared at the white paper-cloth without taking it. "What is this place?" he snapped, with another quick glance at his surroundings, _wrong wrong all wrong _a whispered litany in the back of his mind. "How have you brought me here?"

He heard the sigh rattle through her damaged throat. She gathered her courage, and he could _see _it, as she looked at her hound—_Scooter—_and the one, two, _three_ cats he hadn't noticed. "We both have questions," she stated as she straightened her shoulders.

_Yes, that's why I asked, _he thought venomously.

"I'm going to make a pot of tea," she continued, oblivious. "We're both going to calm down, and we'll talk like adults." She glared at him, so abruptly and ludicrously _fierce _he had to fight the urge to laugh, and added, "But harm my dog, or my cats, and I _will _kill you."

She didn't bother to wait for an answer; instead she stalked past him into what looked, incredibly, like a galley. Her small, pale hands were a blur as she opened cabinets and pulled things from shelves, as she clicked and spun and somehow heat was glowing in a coil of metal underneath a bright red kettle full of water, all with an erect spine and a determined jut to her chin that said _I know you're there_—

He followed her into the galley, and she started like a rabbit when he pressed his advance. Tea leaves scattered a soothing, spicy aroma across the countertop's pale surface, and she quickly scooped them into a small metal sink that had no pump, but two knobs on either side of the faucet. "Yes?" she clipped out coolly without looking at him. But her hands trembled.

A grossly incomplete picture began to piece itself together, as Fenris watched her. _Her _dog. _Her _cats. This—where he _was_—was _her _place. Remorse needled him, as he caught site of the deepening bruise in the shape of his hand around her neck. She was as surprised—and as frightened—as he was. Which meant he owed her—

"I am sorry," he offered quietly. "For hurting you."

She _did _look at him then, eyes sharp beneath the reflective lenses in her spectacles. Absent the toxic glow of his markings, he saw they were a pale green, with a ring of dark blue around the iris. That same slow, hesitant smile twitched across her mouth again, and her shoulders relaxed. "I'm sorry I threw old coffee in your face," she returned his apology. "That can't have been pleasant."

_Scooter. Sorry. Bathroom. Coffee_. _ Oldcoffee? _"It was not," he assured her. He swallowed his questions—_where am__ I who are you am I mad am I _dead—and tried to decide which was important enough to ask first. A shrill whistle to his left screamed through his thoughts, and he held himself completely still while she poured the hot water over the fragrant tea leaves. Her fingers danced over the rectangular face of a hard chest with a sharp _deet deet deet _that reminded him of crickets. _What is this what is that where am I who are you—_

She caught him staring, and a moment of perfect accord shivered through the air between them, of acceptance and insanity. "Let's start with the easy stuff," she suggested, as though she could hear the thoughts chasing themselves in circles within his head. "Names. Mine's Erin."

_Scooter. Sorry. Bathroom. Coffee—oldcoffee? Erin. _"And I am Fenris."

She blanched as though he had raised a hand to her; her hands shook as she clenched and unclenched them into fists. _Something is wrong what is wrong wrong ALL wrong_—

_DEEET! DEEET! DEEEET! _

Erin seized upon the distraction. She pulled the wire basket of wet leaves out of the small pot, pulled a large jar of viscous, amber liquid from a cabinet above her head. Fenris studied the large black letters as she gave the jar a squeeze: _H-O-N-_honey! Finally, something he recognized _but something was wrong, what's wrong_—

"Okay," Erin squeaked. She pulled two clean, chipped ceramic mugs from yet another cabinet, held them by the handles in one hand and the honeyed tea in the other. She pushed gently past him without touching him, and he followed suit as she claimed a corner of the dark blue sofa. "Okay," she said again, but her voice was stronger this time, pitched for taking charge. "Next question?"

He folded into the corner opposite hers. The upholstery beneath him was worn, ragged in places. The low table was simple, unadorned—little more than a block of wood sawed into angles. But both spoke of long use, of durability. The glass clock on the wall ticked quietly, steadily beating silence to death with a brass pendulum. Everything in the room hinted at _quality_, at _privilege_. At _strange_. "Where _am _I?"

_Something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong—_

"At the moment you're in my living room," she replied, with an instinctive flippancy that made him want to drown himself in his tea. _Not her too_. He glared stonily at her, pleased when she couldn't hold his gaze for very long. "Sorry," she mumbled, and she actually sounded it. "Teksuhs. You're in Teksuhs."

His head bobbed in time with the litany of new words he was learning. _Scooter. Sorry. Bathroom. Coffee-oldcoffee? Erin. Teksuhs—"_Teks-uhs?" he echoed, unable to place the name.

"I can show you on a map, if you like."

It was the strangest map he'd ever seen. In fact, it couldn't have looked less like a map if it were consciously trying. Gray. Sleek. She cracked it open with the pad of her thumb, and he saw that instead of cliffs and coastlines drawn on parchment, all it contained were a half-dozen neat rows of black squares, each with a letter etched into the surface. On one half, anyway. The other half was a flat black rectangle of empty space, similar to the one that sat atop the chest of drawers not a few feet distant.

Until she flicked something on the side with a fingernail, and the small black square was suddenly illuminated with pale light. He pressed his back against the sofa in alarm, unable to tear his eyes from the white surface.

"Shit, sorry," Erin swore, expression instantly contrite. "It's okay," she hastily assured him. "It's just-it's like a library. It can't hurt you."

_Scooter sorry bathroom coffee oldcoffee Erin Teks-uhs library? _"It's glowing."

It was a stupid thing to say, but if she thought so, she gave no sign. She only shrugged helplessly as she glanced between his face and the pale glow of—_whatever_it was, as though searching for a way to _explain_. "It's just light, Fenris," was what she finally said, tone gentle. She tapped on the black squares, glancing at him now and then from the corner of her eye. She turned the not-map towards him, only now it _was _a map, though not of any place he knew. Blue lines crossed brown in meaningless squiggles; black dots were scattered across the flat space like bizarre constellations, named by tiny letters he could read if he concentrated but would mean nothing to him. "We're here," Erin continued, pointing to a dot some distance south of a web of crisscrossing lines. "Mehk-si-ko is this way, and my mother lives farther north, in Dallas." Her fingertip followed one brown line down the map's glowing surface, then back up.

Fenris frowned hard at the names, tried to match the letters with the sounds he knew they made. _Dallas _was easy. _Mexico_—Mehks-i-co, so that meant _Texas _had to be Tehk-sus. _Scooter sorry bathroom coffeeoldcoffee Erin Texas Mexico mother Dallas_—

The hot panic threatened to choke him, to smother anything that even remotely resembled reason. He frowned at his reflection, mud-colored in his untouched mug of tea, and took a deep breath of the soothing-spicy steam. Strange, but it smelled like oranges. "How did I _get _here?" he wondered, once he felt a little calmer. Once he felt capable of hearing the answer.

Erin didn't reply right away. She shifted awkwardly on her cushion, tucking her legs underneath her like she was trying to take up as little space as possible. Her dark blue pants were the same color as the sofa, Fenris noticed, except for the large dots of bright pink and green. Her hands curled around her mug, and she took a cautious sip, testing the heat. "What's the last thing you remember?" she finally asked.

_Something's wrong something's wrong something's wrong_—He told her as much as he dared about the ambush, which wasn't much. A curious blankness stole over her face at the mention of Hawke's name-_wrong wrong WRONG WRONG_—and he finished his brief narrative with a shrug. Suspicion was shrieking a song of danger in his blood, setting his scalp tingling. "None of this seems to surprise you," he noticed, schooling his limbs for readiness. He'd go for her throat again. It was weak, already damaged, wouldn't take much force or make much noise—

She stood, the movement deliberately slow as if she _knew_. She crossed the living room to the large black rectangle, and at a single touch it too began to glow, flooding the room with light. "_Shit_, sorry," came the familiar refrain. "It's just like the laptop," Erin tried to soothe him, a quick glance to the map-not-map on the sofa identifying just what in the Void was a laptop. "Just-just tell me when you've had enough?"

Enough? Enough of _what?_

The answer to _that_, at least, soon became apparent, as light swirled and formed pictures. As pictures formed faces, as those faces swam across the flat black surface and were matched to voices he _knew_, had listened to almost daily for three years—_Varric__ Hawke Isabela Anders Merrill oh Maker what is happening I'm dead I have to be dead _but he couldn't stop _watching_.

She stopped, and the players on the strange, flat stage before him stopped. She began again at his forceful insistence, and the players resumed their parts. She halted again, and so did they. Again, he bade her continue, clawed gauntlets leaving shallow cuts on the backs of her hands as he pushed the strange black device back into her hands. She couldn't stop. He wanted her to stop. She _couldn't _stop—

It was a long time before she paused again, swearing under her breath. "I'm going to make myself the strongest drink I possibly can," she said bluntly. "And before we take one more step toward _Crazy Town_, I strongly suggest you have one too."

He couldn't find it in himself to argue. The tea had long ago cooled to the temperature of stone, untouched; a strong drink sounded not only nice, but necessary for survival. He nodded his acquiescence; her movements were brisk and self-assured as she again pulled bottles and glasses from the cabinets. She returned with a glass of something sweet and cloying, and a nearly-full bottle of a gold liquid that smelled like salt and poison. This she placed in front of him with a sharp, hollow _thunk. _

"Really?" she drawled in response to his blank look. "They really don't have tequila in Kirkwall?" She scattered a handful of green, tart fruits cut into wedges beside the bottle. "Swig," she instructed briefly, "then bite into the lime." She demonstrated for his benefit; her face puckered, and she looked as though she had to force herself to swallow. She thrust the bottle into his hand and drank deeply from her own glass, staring at the mirror-like stage in reluctant challenge. "Let's do this thing."

Memory pitched and swelled. _Anso_. He'd _met _Anso. Had _hired _Anso. How many times had he suffered through Varric's exaggerated version of that night? Fenris watched, helpless to tear his gaze away. Hawke wandered through the Lowtown night, guided by Erin's fingertips. The trapped house—the empty chest—_look__ away look away look away—_

"Your men are dead, and your trap has failed."

_Too late_.

He had said those words—those _exact _words. They were the very first he'd uttered in Hawke's hearing. They were how he'd _met _Hawke. It was his voice. His face. He could _feel _the weight of Erin's gaze swing between his face, and the _other _his-face. Could feel the salty heat of the tequila grow sour in his stomach. _Deorum elysia—no no no no no—_

Erin's eyes widened in alarm. He was aware of her in only the most remote sense of the word, all his concentration bent on himself, on the rebellion of his body and senses. She scrambled past him; there was a metallic _whong _as she thrust a bowl into his lap. His gauntlets made a horrid scraping sound against its edges; the gorge rose in his throat and he couldn't even spare an ounce of thought for his subsequent humiliation.

Someone was gently patting his back between his shoulder blades, telling him she was sorry again and again, _Jesus Fenris I'm so sorry_. He leaned his forehead on the edge of the bowl, spent, and she gently eased him off of it. The room swam; he'd be more concerned about a repeat performance except he didn't think he had anything left to offer. And then she was tugging him by the wrist into the bathroom—_oh,__ privy_, his inebriated mind supplied—and spinning one of the knobs on one side of a faucet and warm water was filling the sink and she did it all without _touching _him because of course she _knew _not to touch him because she knew who he _was_ and that's what's _wrong—_

"_Are you a god?_" he asked her, his words slurring on his tongue.

Russet brows wiggled with compassionate confusion, as she led him out of the privy-bathroom and into an adjacent chamber. "Sorry babe, I don't speak Tevinter," she said, with a small, sympathetic chuckle.

"_Probably not, then_." His bum landed on something soft and yielding, and he fell gratefully backwards. Silence pounded against him, in time with his heartbeat thudding into a mattress that smelled vaguely of something sweet and feminine. He listened—_hard_—and it took a very long time for him to realize he had been left alone. The _sounds _of her faded, as clothes rustled and wood thumped quietly against wood. Consciousness began to slip through his fingers like sand.

_Scooter. Sorry. Bathroom. Coffee._

_Erin._


	2. A Fine Phrenesis

Fenris approached consciousness with deep resentment, trying to piece together his surroundings without actually opening his eyes. The claws of his gauntlets dug into the soft nest of bedding underneath him. A faint trace of sweet, clean scent drifted across his senses. A foul, fuzzy taste coated his mouth, and an unforgiving, drumming throb had begun to beat between his temples. He was alive. That was something, at least. 

A door popped softly open and closed again. In the dull thud of silence that followed came a short, high-pitched giggle. Fenris reluctantly cracked his eyelids open-and froze.

Yellow-white sunlight pooled in irregular rectangles on a carpet that was neither white nor brown, but somehow the ugliest possible compromise between both. The sheets beneath his cheek were soft and fine, patterned with pale blue swirls that made him feel alarmingly dizzy. Bookshelves lined the wall opposite the bed-two tall in the corners, two short beneath the window. A squat desk dominated the wall on the north side, with a luxurious black chair shoved against it. Two chests of drawers were crammed side-by-side on the south wall, the nearest so close he could have laid his hand flat atop its surface, were it not already occupied by several stacks of books. 

And the books were _everywhere_. Stuffed into the shelves, scattered across the floor, piled untidily onto the corner of the desk. He was surrounded—sharp corners and flat planes all leering at him with teeth of nigh-incomprehensible print—

Fenris took a deep breath and rolled over, releasing it only when he found nothing but white-gray wall on the western side, opposite the window. It was strangely comforting, that emptiness; it gave him space in which to think. To remember. Images swept over him in a jumbled, chaotic wash. He chased them down, put them in some semblance of order. The ambush. The bloodmage's smirk as he launched his attack. And then—and then it was _impossible_. One step to the next, and he was far away from Hawke, from Kirkwall, from _everything_. Yet he was close enough to watch his own life flash across a flat black stage that could glow, with barely a touch from small hands that darted through the air like pale and anxious birds—

_Erin_. 

The mattress squeaked quietly as Fenris bolted off the pillow. He was in her place. In her _bed_. And he was _alone_. She had left him to himself; only her books—her many, _many _books—crowded solitude. So where was she, then? 

There were two doors in the small chamber. One opened into a wardrobe stuffed with what seemed like enough clothing for six people, nevermind one. Only nobles possessed so many clothes, in his experience. But somehow, he couldn't make any of these strange garments _fit _on the haughty Kirkwall gentry. He couldn't picture Hawke, for example, in the loose, thin shirt and the truncated breeches laid out atop one of the stacks of books on the desk. 

Fenris padded across the carpeted floor and pressed his ear against the other door, straining to detect—_anything_. There was nothing familiar in the cadence of muffled noises on the other side of the wooden barrier. A dog—_Scooter—_whimpered with excitement at the bone-like rattle of something being poured into a container. Liquid and pressure made a hollow hiss. Wood thumped and glass knocked quietly against itself. Beneath everything was a pointed, careful silence, as though someone was trying to make as little noise as possible.

Fenris curled his palm around the doorknob, wincing at the harsh scrape of his gauntlet against metal. The door swung gently toward him, and he hesitantly stepped into the short, narrow hallway beyond. To his right was the privy-room he remembered from the night before. And to his left—

A black-and-blue blur darted across his path and dove beneath the low table. All he could see of the mottled hound was its black nose, glistening wetly as it twitched. A gray-striped cat leapt delicately onto the back of the dark blue sofa to regard him with a contemptuous black-and-amber gaze; a second was a black streak as it fled into the open bedchamber. The third was little more than a pair of tufted ears and eyes narrowed into sleepy, acid-green slits, peering at him from atop a three-tiered tower covered in cream-and-brown carpet. But of his hostess, there was no—

"Hey." 

She carefully stepped closer to him on stocking feet. One hand held out a mug, handle pointed toward him, and he warily accepted it. A warm, light brown liquid sloshed gently inside, smelling strongly of the same bitter drink she'd thrown in his face last night. "Are you trying to poison me again?" he asked. 

She—_Erin _rolled her eyes pointedly at the empty bottle still resting on the low wooden table. "Three quarters of a bottle of tequila would poison anyone, including most marine mammals and one or two extinct varieties of mammoth," she drawled. 

Fenris sniffed apprehensively at the whorls of steam drifting toward the ceiling. Her answer was no answer at all; he tried to sieve some sense out of the mud in her apparently natural sarcasm but found none. What was a _marine mammal_? For that matter, what was a _mammoth_? 

Erin huffed a brief sigh, shoulders slumping in apology. "Coffee's not for everyone," she explained. "But it's not poison." 

He took the first sip through pursed lips, determined to let as little of the bitter drink pass into his mouth as possible. But then the first drops rolled across his tongue. It was as bitter as it smelled, savoring of deep, brown earth and tempered with sweetness. The salty-sour fog of the previous night was abruptly blasted away, leaving his mind feeling clear and alert. Erin grinned unexpectedly as she watched him drink; her teeth were even and white, and he felt his own taut features soften in response. 

_Coffee_. He would remember. 

He followed Erin into the tiny galley; he traced the cool, black coils of metal atop the stove with his eyes and followed the swanlike neck of the faucet with a fingertip. Erin bounced between the parallel countertops, absorbed in the steps of some chore he could not fathom. She filled a glass pitcher with water from the pump-less faucet-then emptied it into a black-and-steel—box? She lifted herself onto her toes and took a large jar of dark brown beans from one of the cabinets above her head; these she scooped into a small, raised bowl and flipped its hinged lid closed. He fought not to leap out of his skin as a harsh, grinding sound growled through the morning's hush; it halted as suddenly as it had begun and Erin tapped the fine-ground, brown dust into a basket nestled snugly in the strange box's top. She passed her hand down its front; there was a quiet click, and it abruptly released a wet, coughing growl. Dark water trickled into the glass pitcher, and that same, bitter savory aroma burst into the air in clouds of steam. 

Fenris sipped from the mug in his hand, watching as the pitcher slowly filled with coffee. Silently, he considered the woman standing an arm's length distant. She knew not to press too close. Because she _knew_. Something fearful and wild whipped through him, as the possibility took shape in his mind. If she _knew_, could she _know—_

"You know who I am," he finally broke the strained silence. 

The air stirred gently around her as Erin reached into a cabinet above her head. She spooned a grainy white powder—sugar, he thought, but he couldn't be sure—into another mug and poured the fresh coffee over it. "You're Fenris, and I'm Erin," she replied with distracted flippancy. "I thought we covered this." 

"No," he snapped. Temper and frustration surged hotly through him. Coffee splashed over the back of his hand as he roughly slammed his mug onto the counter; he took a menacing step toward her. "You know who I _am_. You know who I was before—_this._" He held up his clenched fists between them in illustration, making the markings dance mockingly over his skin.

Erin's expression seemed to sag, as comprehension dawned. Her eyelids dropped over her pale irises, and for the first time he noticed the violet bruises that marred the delicate skin around her eyes. Had she not slept? 

She heaved a sigh, and ducked past his upraised arms to reach into yet another strange box—this one radiated pure, elemental cold, and he caught a glimpse of meat and vegetables as she pulled out a paper crate of white cream. "Yeah," she admitted resignedly. "I know who you are." 

_She knew_. Something broke open inside him; it was a long moment before Fenris could give it its name. _Hope_. "Tell me." Strange, but the demand felt like a prayer. 

Erin's mug made a hollow, scraping sound against the countertop as she spun it in her fingers. Almost imperceptibly, she drew her shoulders closer to her ears, and she was gnawing on her bottom lip again. Fenris had the overall impression of something tightening its coils upon itself. "I don't know much," she warned him feebly. "But. Your name was—or maybe is—Leto. And you have a sister." The mug shook as her hands trembled, and she set it down carefully. A bluntly-chopped curtain of auburn hair shielded her downcast eyes and sheet-white cheeks from his hungry, supplicating gaze. "You learn most of this from her—um, later." 

"I—I have a sister?" Fenris dared interrupt her reluctant mercy. 

"Yeah. Varania." She swallowed hard, and pushed one of those perpetually-nervous hands through her hair. "You meet her—_will _meet her, sorry—when, uh—oh Jesus." Erin buried her face in her palms and curled her shoulders over herself. "She—she betrays you," she explained, sounding as though she was speaking through broken glass. "She, uh. She leads Danarius to the Hanged Man because he'dpromisedtomakeheramagister." She rushed through this last confession; she'd squeezed her eyes shut, and she'd pulled her hands into the sleeves of her bulky gray sweater until only her fingertips were visible. 

Fenris dug frantically through the murky depths of Before—before Danarius, before the markings, before _everything_. He tried to find something—anything—that would link this _Varania_ to him: a face, or even a feeling. He tried to leap from joy to rage when he heard of her predestined betrayal. But there was _nothing_. Only empty darkness. 

He didn't want to know, he told himself. A treacherous sister whose face he could not even recall was bad enough. But—he _had _to know. "The markings?" he whispered raggedly. 

"Fenris _please _don't make—" 

"Tell me!" 

"You won them!" she capitulated in a burst of misery. She drew in a deep breath, held it for a count of three, and let it out agonizingly slowly. "Okay. _Okay_. You won them," she repeated, and finally met his eyes. She seemed calmer, if only a fraction. "There was this—contest, I guess. And whoever won got _those_." She nodded at the markings. "So. You won, and they—the Imperium, Danarius, I guess?—gave you the markings. That's all I know," she finished with a helpless shrug. 

A prize. With his eyes, Fenris traced the crisscrossing swirls of lyrium burned into his skin. A _prize_. Leto—whoever _he _was—had traded his memories for this. Had traded his _life _for this. _Willingly_. "Why?" he managed hoarsely. 

"In the game, you did it to free her," Erin replied, sounding small and lost. "And your mother." Her hand drifted through the air and alighted on his armored shoulder. She carefully spread her fingers around the black spikes; all he could feel of her was the negligible pressure exerted by her palm. "On the plus side," she added weakly, "you shove your hand through Danarius's chest and rip his living heart out. And Hadriana's. Though that happens a bit earlier in the game." Her hand slid from his shoulder like a bird brought low by a stone. "So there's—there's that."

Fenris bent his head and pressed his eyes shut. He was only distantly aware of Erin, of the space between them growing as she retreated. Words like _sister _and _betrays _and _game_ splintered like hollow trees, while others-_prize_—dropped like rain, icy on his marked skin. He had no reason to believe the distressed confession he's forced from his hostess, other than he could not fathom a reason for her to lie. For years, he'd held fast to the certainty that the markings had been forced upon him. He felt something dry to crackling darkness and die within him: it was not so, it would seem. 

_Now what?_

A warm, solid weight landed on his foot, and he glanced down in surprise. The mottled hound leaned against his leg, gazing up at him with mournful, dog-brown eyes. He could feel the pressure of its bulk through his armor, the coarseness of its fur on the top of his foot. But other than that—_nothing_? He laid his palm atop the bony skull, moved two fingertips to and fro behind one floppy black ear. The hound's eyes narrowed to slits, and he stopped. It nudged his hand with its muzzle, and he surrendered to its—_her _mute entreaty. "I have many more questions," he began slowly.

Erin blinked behind her oval spectacles, as though surprised to be addressed. "Ask anything you want," she blurted. 

He nudged his mug with a fingertip. "Is there any more coffee?" he asked hopefully. 

She tossed back her head and released a brief peal of laughter. "All you want, babe," she answered. 

It was the oddest, most informative tour Fenris had ever received. A demonstration of how to make a pot of coffee became a rambling history of the beverage itself, which apparently began with desert tribesman and—dancing goats? Had he understood that correctly? Her explanation of power—_electricity,_ which anyone could use and he found that frankly incredible—turned into an impassioned recounting of the rivalry between two mages, or as she called them, _inventors_. And when she showed him how to operate the flushing privy, he couldn't contain a startled laugh any longer. 

Wires. Pipes. Pressure. Circuits. Television. Laptop. Internet. These words, he committed to memory. But not _once _did he hear her utter the word _magic_. 

"There isn't any," Erin answered, when he broached the subject. "You hungry?" Without waiting for an answer, she pulled a loaf of bread from the pantry, brown-and-white slices neatly contained by a sack of some sleek material she called _plastic_. He watched in wary fascination as she pulled two jars from the cold cabinet—_refrigerator—_

with one hand, and a butter knife from a drawer with the other. She slathered a light brown paste onto one slice; the other received a generous dollop from the second jar, which Fenris belatedly recognized as some sort of fruit preserves. She pressed the doctored slices of bread together and sliced the final product into triangular halves. 

Fenris sniffed cautiously at the half she passed to him on a blue-and-white plate. It smelled like bread, nuts and fruit. His stomach rumbled tellingly; he'd put nothing but coffee into it all day. He was unprepared for the rush of flavor, for the malleable depth that stuck to his teeth and tongue long after he'd swallowed. 

The corners of Erin's mouth twitched. "Shit-sorry," she apologized. He'd started thinking of the phrase as one word. Biting down hard on what threatened to be a giggle at his expense, she pulled a jug from the refrigerator and poured him a glass of cold, white milk. "This should help," she offered blandly, but amusement still faintly creased the corners of her eyes, warmed to a startling green.

They ate together in silence, he standing beside the coffee-making-machine, she perched on the countertop opposite. Each took his or her cue from the other; when Erin rinsed the crumbs from her plate and placed it in yet _another _cabinet she called a dishwasher—how many cabinets could one person need?—Fenris followed suit. When he glanced at the open laptop, she led him out of the tiny kitchen and into the more open living room, which seemed to serve any and all purposes except sleeping and bathing. He discovered she had meant it when she had said he could ask her anything; even if the answer left him with more questions, such as her convoluted explanation of the relationship between the histories and religions of her people, she ungrudgingly offered one. And if she couldn't, she pulled her laptop toward her and with a few quick strokes across the black squares—which were called _keys_, even though they unlocked nothing—she requested answers from _Google_. Which, as far as Fenris could discern, was some sort of impersonal deity of information and nevermind _why _the supplicant wanted it. 

He appreciated the effort his hostess expended not to burst into derisive laughter, when he finally said as much. Even if her urge to do so was plain. "I'm not laughing at you," Erin assured him in response to his scowl. "Well, not _just _at you. This is _my _world," she struggled to explain. A furrow deepened between the russet brows. "I've never had to explain _all _of it to anyone before." 

"And—that amuses you," Fenris surmised. 

"Oh yeah," she replied candidly. "Crap, I need to walk Scooter." She thrust her laptop to one side and disappeared into the bedchamber. Scooter's ears perked forward, responding to some stimulus Fenris could not yet identify. The hound's tail burst into sweeping motion when Erin reemerged, a pair of shoes dangling from one hand and dressed in an unadorned, long-sleeved shirt and trousers of some indigo fabric he could not name. The trousers clung to her, while the shirt merely hinted at the shape beneath its folds. Fenris had the overall impression he could see only the bottom half of an hourglass. 

She tugged the shoes onto her feet with two precise, economic motions, the better to dodge her dog's excited lunges for her face. Scooter's tail whacked against the furniture in a way that sounded almost painful as Erin took a brightly-colored lead from a hook on the wall and attached it to a metal loop on the hound's collar with a smart _click_. Only when she turned and looked at him expectantly did he realize she meant for him to accompany her. 

"You would permit me to leave?" he asked in surprise.

She blinked once, slowly. "You're not a _prisoner_, Fenris," she replied softly. "Besides, could I stop you?" she added pragmatically. Very deliberately, she kept her gaze restrained to his face, instead of allowing it to wander over his markings. Guilt squirmed faintly in the pit of his stomach, even as he admitted to himself she had a point. 

The world beyond the door was even more riotously strange. Erin's apartment was on the edge of a small, square courtyard, paved in red brick. Young trees had been planted at strategic intervals, their trunks braced with poles; older, taller trees sheltered the structures with broad leaves and dappled shadows. Black posts topped with bulbed lanterns—_lightbulbs,_ he remembered—were scattered across the brown grass lawns, so that no one stretch of steps was left in the dark. Other doors, other apartments honeycombed the surrounding buildings, stacked atop one another in three stories. Fenris struggled to find a comparison among the places he knew, and could find none. It was too clean for Lowtown, too humble for Hightown, and too—too _cheerful _for the elven Alienage he had _always _gone out of his way to avoid. Even the birdsong sounded utterly alien, underscored by a distant hiss he at first mistook for wind, before he realized the trees' topmost branches remained unmoving. 

Erin led the way down a narrow footpath paved in rough, gray stone she called _cement_, and added that the original formula had been invented during the reign of an empire, long gone but apparently not forgotten. The _cement _yielded to an open stableyard of _blacktop_, which Erin explained was a precise mix of tar and fine gravel. Fenris was shocked to find neat rows of carriages, black wheels and jewel-toned bodies shimmering in the pale light cast by the late afternoon sun. He counted nearly two dozen alone among those he could see. Confusion burned like a brand in the back of his mind. All these carriages and not a horse in sight—? He followed Erin's example as she skirted the fathomless puddles standing in the blacktop; she led him onto another cement walkway, Scooter trotting happily beside her. 

And then, without warning, all hell broke loose.

The first sign of danger was an aggressive, broken growl. Fenris whirled, only to find himself face to face with a gleaming, black-and-silver sneer as the monstrous carriage barreled toward him, independent of horses or any force he could see. The growl's timbre rose to a deep-throated whine; he felt the wind of its hot breath stir his hair as it blew past him. The growl faded as swiftly as it had advanced, until all he could hear was that incessant his in the background. Fenris supposed he should have felt grateful he was beneath its notice; instead, all he felt was _angry_. He should have known. 

"Compensating for something?" Erin yelled derisively in its wake. She tossed him a grin over her shoulder, which quickly faded. "What?" she asked, the creases in her forehead deepening in concern.

Fenris glared at her. It was offensive enough that she had claimed there was no magic when plainly there _was_. But that she still pretended ignorance in blatant contradiction to the obvious? "You said there was no magic," he snarled. A second carriage crept towards them, its belly low to the ground as it made a ponderous turn onto a blacktop path. "You told me it was all wires, or pipes." 

A stricken expression stole instantly over her features. Her eyes widened in realization, and her brows drooped with remorse. "It's _not _magic, Fenris," she insisted. Hurriedly she pulled out a rectangle of polished blackness he thought was called a _screen_, and tapped her fingertips against its surface. Her eyes darted from side to side as it revealed whatever answer she sought. "It's—well, it's complicated. It's like this—there's this big mess of gears and cables, called an engine. It needs fuel to work. Pumps and things move the fuel from the gas tank to the engine, which causes a reaction that converts the fuel to energy. And the engine runs, which makes the wheels move, the brakes, the steering wheel, everything." She smiled nervously, fingers pulling the cuffs of her shirt over her knuckles. "Do you want to go for a ride?" she offered hesitantly. "I can show you what I mean." 

Fenris eyed the swift, horseless carriages distrustfully. _Fuel_, she had said. _Pumps_. _Engine. _Fuel and pumps could accomplish small things, he granted, but _this_? Monsters that raced to and fro at dizzying speeds, faster than any horse-drawn cart he had ever seen-how could such things even be _possible_, unaided by magic? 

Erin stared at him, wide-eyed, bottom lip firmly trapped between her teeth in apprehension. There was no way to be certain, except the one she had offered. "Fine," he bit out tersely. 

"Sorry?" 

"_Let's go_." 

He followed her back to the blacktop stableyard—the _parking lot_, she called it. Hers was one of the smaller carriages, or _cars_, sapphire blue paint obscured by a thin layer of dust. Up close, he could see each car had a wheel on one side, and at least two places for passengers to sit. At a word from her mistress, Scooter hopped daintily into the long rear seat, sitting obediently as he and Erin slid into the two chair-like seats in front. "Steering wheel," she explained, placing a hand on the circle before her. "Seatbelts, ignition, brake, accelerator, gearshift—oh, sorry about the mess," she added contritely when his feet rattled against a veritable bone pile of cups, cans, and yet more books. "Grab that end of the seatbelt-behind you, right shoulder, and pull it across to this buckle here." She tapped a small orange rectangle on his left side with one fingertip, and he followed her direction. He heard a _click_, and he was fastened into his seat. "When we stop, you push this—" She did, and the flat metal protrusion sprang free of its slot. "And you're out. You good?" 

"I am required to wear this seatbelt?" he asked, tugging experimentally on the strap. It slid back and forth between his gauntlets, resisting his grip ever so slightly but not enough to make sitting uncomfortable. 

"'Fraid so. Don't worry," she assured him. "You're perfectly safe." 

She fished her ring of keys from her pocket, flipping through them until she selected a long key with a large black insignia on one end, and pushed it into the slot on the right-hand side of the steering wheel. She turned it in her fingers, and the engine coughed to life in response. From inside, the engine's growl was little more than a quiet purr. Erin pulled on the unobtrusive lever between the seats, and the carriage lurched into backwards motion. With another gentle tug, she coaxed it into crawling forward, lightly pressing down with her foot to add speed. Fenris watched her leg shift, and the car slowed to a stop. Another shift, and it was moving again, following the practiced motion of her hands on the steering wheel. This...this he thought he recognized, even though it was mad. It was not a carriage at all, but a ship. A ship without water. 

"See that button with the little triangles?" 

Fenris glanced at the array of black squares under his right hand, and nodded. "Push down on the one with the point facing you," Erin directed. She was smiling—a secretive, conspiratorial quirk in one corner of her mouth that made him wonder anew if he should afford her even the most marginal measure of trust. He did as she bid, and the oblong pane of glass disappeared slowly into the door. 

A burst of cool wind whipped through the open window, and he blinked against its sting as once again, the carriage began to move. The wind pulled at his hair, roared in his ears as Erin's strange carriage gained momentum on the smooth black road. It was a curious sensation, moving this swiftly while sitting still. Fenris's lips curved of their own volition, as he leaned into the seat and closed his eyes. He'd been wrong. He was neither in a carriage, nor a ship.

He was _flying_.

Gravel crunched and popped beneath the car's weight, as Erin guided it to a stop. Fenris opened his eyes, and found himself staring at an emerald-green expanse of thick grass. Small groups of people milled unhurriedly about. Other dogs with their masters traveled the dirt paths crisscrossing beneath the trees. Children shrieked with laughter, engaged in some game that seemed to be based on no rules but _run_. Pale gray clouds threatened rain as they drifted across the sun, a threat made empty by the puddles he saw collected between tree roots. He poked his head through the open window, and was surprised to hear the faint cadence of running water under—over?—the incessant hiss of carriage wheels—_tires_, rather—on blacktop. 

Scooter pawed excitedly at the inside of the car's door, muzzle pointing at the black interior handle. Fenris gave the handle on his own door a cautious yank, and it popped open without resistance. Erin grabbed for her hound's lead, and fished a flat, round disc from the floor. Fenris eyed it curiously, unable to form a guess as to its purpose. But Scooter recognized it. She made a toothy grab for it, and was rewarded with a light smack on the snout for her trouble. "You know better," Erin admonished her firmly, but her reproach was softened with a quick, one-two scratch as she led the way down one of the dirt paths. "Welcome to Riverside Park!" 

Fenris had to admit, it was aptly named. The river was a palpable force, insistently tranquil as it bent and curved against its banks. Erin stripped out of her shoes and socks, using the unearthed roots as footholds as she carefully picked her way down to the water. Scooter swiped her tongue along her chops, brown eyes riveted to the disc in Erin's hand. The hand twitched, and suddenly the disc was spinning gracefully through the air to land in the center of the river. Scooter splashed wildly after it, leaving Fenris alone with his hostess.

"So this is pretty much it," she broke the silence. She waved a hand through the air in front of her, as if to encompass—well, _everything_. "Modern life." She wrested the disc from Scooter's jaws and threw it again, much to the hound's displeasure. "It's no Kirkwall, but maybe it won't be so bad while we figure out how to get you home." 

_Kirkwall isn't home_. 

Fenris wasn't so foolhardy as to give voice to this sentiment. Though a part of him badly wanted to. Whatever—_wherever _home was, he hoped he could do better than an abandoned, decrepit manse, whose stone and mortar whispered of despair every time he turned a corner. He hoped he could do better than near-constant entanglements with mages' schemes and scraping a hand-to-mouth living and a pair of disconcertingly blue eyes that focused on him too often and too—too _much_. 

He returned his attention to the woman standing a short distance ahead of him. Water rippled around her ankles as she adjusted her stance, preparing to toss Scooter's toy again. The brightly-colored disc soared downriver, and the mottled hound dove after it with a heedless abandon he envied. Erin's mouth quirked in amusement as her dog paddled furiously away from them. She breathed in a deep sigh; she tipped her chin sunward and remarkably, something in her seemed to ease. The sunken violet bruises beneath her eyes lightened. The taut curve of her shoulders relaxed, and the amused quirk slowly widened into a true smile. 

"No," Fenris conceded without thinking. "It won't be so bad." 

He accepted Erin's unspoken invitation when she offered him the disc, and tried to imitate the precise snap of her wrist he'd observed. The disc tilted sideways in midair, and landed gracelessly between Scooter's ears. 

"Nice shot," Erin snorted, as the confused hound wildly swiveled her long muzzle to and fro. 

Fenris slanted her a cautious glance, uncertain of the proper response to her sardonic teasing. Scooter dropped her toy at his feet and sat expectantly. He tried again; this time, it sailed a respectable distance before veering off to the side. Again and again he threw it, technique improving each time. Again and again, the hound splashed into the current, broad pink tongue waving from her jaws like a flag. It was a novel way to pass the time, he reflected, and not one he'd ever thought to experience. 

_Play_. 

Erin only called a halt when Scooter was practically dragging her tongue through the sand and dirt on the riverbank. She draped a long length of soft, absorbent cloth over the rear seat of her car, and the mongrel hopped inside with the ease of routine. Fenris caught himself lamenting the brevity of the return journey; he shut his eyes determinedly and let the erratic breeze play havoc with the strands of his white hair. 

Flying carriages and no magic. The expression that crept across his features felt too small and strange to be called a smile, but it was _present_. No, he thought, this would not be so bad at—

_Change _frosted the atmosphere with danger, so abruptly familiar he instinctively grabbed for the hilt of his greatsword, forgotten on a stretch of sand an entire existence away. Erin stared expressionlessly into empty air, chest rising and falling with a slow, measured rhythm. He followed the direction of her gaze, but could see only a handful of the same cars in the lot as had been there before. He half-turned his head, straining to keep as much of the parking lot in view as was possible. Any one of these cars could provide cover for an unseen assailant; Fenris schooled his muscles into a wary, sitting crouch and peered through the slanted glass of the car's front-facing window. "What's wrong?" he asked, voice low and urgent. 

"My boyfriend's home," she replied, almost inaudibly.

Her answer took him aback; it was so at odds with her demeanor, with the _change _in her, that he wasn't certain if she was serious. The muscles of her throat worked as if she struggled to swallow. She clenched her fists around the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. The relaxed smile he'd seen at the park had tightened into a grim, nervous line, and her pale eyes had turned icy green above the half-moon bruises. What was a _boyfriend_, he wondered with mounting alarm, that it inspired such a fearful reaction? 

A _boyfriend_, it soon became apparent, was a young man of gawky build and a narrow face thinly stubbled with dark whiskers. A _boyfriend_'s hazel eyes flashed with instant dislike, even as the man's thin lips curved in an insincere smile of greeting. A _boyfriend _stretched his hand through the cold, empty space in false friendship, and said coldly, "I don't believe we've met." 

Erin introduced him as _Charlie_. She stepped between them, waving a hand through the intervening distance like decorum could build a bridge. "Charlie, this is Fenris," she finished the ritual, defiantly polite.

Charlie's eyes narrowed sharply, first on Erin, and then on Fenris. Another flash, one of recognition, gleamed in the chilly depth of his gaze as he rolled the name around in his mouth. "Fenris. As in—_Fenris_." 

Erin nodded, expression twisting into a rictus of good cheer. "He blew in with the storm last night," she explained casually. Fenris may as well have been a stray cat, or an inconvenient leaf. "Or very early this morning. We were just about to start brainstorming ideas on how he got here and how to get him back to Kirkwall." 

Gallantry was not a habit Fenris had had much practice with, but pity—pity and not a little guilt—stirred him. She might have done as much for a common vagabond, or an injured child, but she had been kind to him. He owed her. "Erin has been kind enough to offer her hospitality," he offered. 

That wintry, hazel glare flicked to him for the barest instant, and returned to Erin with a vengeance that could only be called _jealousy_. "I'll bet she has," Charlie sneered. 

The counterfeit smile crashed from Erin's face, leaving it blank and pale with anger. "Just what is _that _supposed to mean?" she demanded waspishly. 

Oh. Realization, palpable and merciless as a mace to the head, and _much _too late to be of any help, struck Fenris. A _boyfriend _was a _lover_. And _this—_this was a lovers' quarrel. Because of _him_. 

_Futis_. 

"You know exactly what I mean, Erin!" Charlie's voice rose, and he drew Erin away with a fierce grip on her elbow. "You expect me to believe this is _the _Fenris? Who is he to you, Erin, really? I deserve to know that much." 

She tugged her arm free, fists clenching and unclenching at her sides. "I told you, his name is Fenris," she insisted. "He blew in with the storm last night." Her chin tilted stubbornly towards the ceiling; she held her shoulders in a rigid, unyielding line. A line that abruptly sagged in self-consciousness, as she half-turned toward Fenris with a pained expression. "Look, can we maybe take this outside?" she suggested, sounding anguished. _I'm sorry, _she added silently to Fenris, when Charlie acquiesced. 

Scooter poked her nose through a gap in the curtains and released a piteous whimper. Fenris bitterly regretted the errant impulse that had in one fell swoop deprived him of his guide and made him the focus of a vicious lovers' quarrel. This _Charlie_, this _boyfriend_ now not only believed Erin a liar, but complicit in—in some vulgar betrayal. This _Charlie _knew who he _was_. A reckless impulse indeed, he thought darkly. One he would take care not to repeat. 

He attempted to occupy his hands with the steps to preparing coffee; he tried to mimic the swift, practiced trails of Erin's hands through the air. His gauntlets made handling the pitcher an unnaturally precarious task; the claws scratched across the glass surface with a sound that made Scooter whip her head towards him with mingled confusion and distress. He set it down hurriedly, grateful no one besides the dog had seen his blunder. 

He prowled restlessly through the living room, desperately seeking something to snare his attention besides the escalating argument on the cement stoop. Whereas the bedroom had seemed full to overflowing with books, the living room was a riot of _papers_ bundled together and held in place with a small sliver of metal, bent into prongs. He'd seen this manner of neat, tight paragraphs before—these must be treatises of some kind. Fenris squinted at the titles in bafflement. _mtDNA Reveals Secrets in Ourselves_; _C-R-A-N-I-O-F-A-C-I-A-L Measurements in Juveniles_; _F-E-M-U-R Length and Height_— He recognized the letters, even most of the words, but their configurations formed only nonsense. He thumbed through the stack on the low table, and was only further frustrated by a non-pattern of arcane squiggles: a backwards Z with too many angles; an O with a line straight through its center-in what realm could any of _this _make the slightest sense? What _was _she, that she needed all _this_, these purposeless symbols and jumbled letters—?

The front door swung open. Fenris guiltily jerked to his feet, embarrassed to have been caught snooping. Erin pressed her back heavily against the door's momentum, and it clicked shut. She looked drained—even ragged. The whites of her eyes were tinged an angry pink; her hair had the wild look of having one or both hands repeatedly shoved through it. She stared blankly at the mess Fenris had made of her treatises, as though it didn't matter. She gave him a wan, lost glance and—_shrugged_? "Well," she remarked flatly. "That's done." 

"What is?" 

"That. Us." Erin waved her fingers towards the porch. Through the gap in the white curtains, he could see it was deserted. Charlie was gone. 

_Venhedis_.

"Hey, um. Will you be okay, by yourself?" she continued haltingly. "For a little while? I've got some, um. I need to—" 

Fenris felt his lips work soundlessly. There were _things _one said, he knew, in situations such as this. _I'm sorry _was on the tip of his tongue. _My doing_ lurked blackly in some forgotten pit of his conscience. And somehow, _Please make more coffee _seemed singularly inappropriate. "Of course," was all he decided he could say safely. "Take—ah—take your time." 

She nodded slowly without looking at him. She rifled through the clean, white treatises and, using some scale of judgment he could not identify, pulled a select few from the stacks. These, she slid into a shapeless brown satchel. In a monotone, she promised to leave the _laptop_, so he could _read up _on—

"Life, I guess," Erin surmised. "I'll be back, um. Later. Oh." She set down her satchel, and gestured him out of her path with a distracted flick of her fingers. "In case I'm not back, lemme show you—" She shoved her short table out of the way and began pulling the cushions from the dark blue sofa. She tugged on a handle concealed beneath the middle cushion, and—a _bed_ unfurled from _inside _the furniture. Clever. Mechanical. _No magic_. 

The door swung shut. Fenris was alone. 

_ Venhedae futis faasta vas._

How long was _a little while_? Fenris didn't know. He paced the length of the living room; he counted the number of strides it took to follow the perimeter of the room's irregular rectangle. Twelve. When he added the bedchamber to his pacing the number increased to twenty-two. He glared back at the leering bookshelves; up close—and sober—he noticed other objects scattered upon the wooden surfaces. Small, eerily exact portraits in wooden frames; empty jars painted with vivid swirls of color; a ceramic bowl filled with flat, oval coins that upon closer inspection, were each stamped with a different design. _Vishante_, there had to be close to fifty of them—

Varric would have called them _knick-knacks_; Fenris called it _clutter_. 

He had to crane his neck to clearly read the sideways titles of the books packed tightly together. Some of these were as incomprehensible as the treatises in the other room: what, for instance, was _A-R-C-H-A-E-O-L-O-G-Y_? He used the claw on his index finger to coax it out from between two of its fellows: the illustration on the front cover did little to allay his bewilderment. A man stood beside a deep pit, the bones of some great beast half-unearthed at his feet. _S-T-A-T-I-S-T-I-C-S: An introduction _proved to be a tome covered in the same indecipherable symbols he'd seen in the treatises. 

Fenris slid the volumes back into their places, attention caught on a smattering of titles etched on cheap, paper spines in elaborate script. He flushed to his tapered ears at the illustration on one of the covers: a voluptuous woman was held in thrall by an improbably muscular man, an expression of tender ecstasy stamped on her painted features. Hurriedly he shoved it back among the others like it, making a mental note to avoid that shelf in the future. 

He tapped the tips of his claws against the outside of the bookshelf, frowning in concentration. So far, his reluctant hostess appeared to be a noble, a pack rat, and a scholar-though he could not begin to guess at her purpose. A furtive inspection of the desk's drawers served only to strengthen this tentative impression: odd utensils, neither quill nor stylus but clearly intended for writing rolled across the drawers' bottoms as he pulled them out. Paper of all sizes rested in neat stacks, tightly bound between stiff covers with spirals of wire. He picked one up at random, only to hastily thrust it aside when _Charlie is driving me FUCKING CRAZY _leapt at him from the page, scrawled in haste with black ink. Bad enough he had irreparably disrupted her life; he had no wish to _invade_ it. 

Scooter followed his erratic pacing with her muzzle, watching him with forlorn bewilderment as _a little while _stretched past dusk. Fenris tried again to prepare coffee, and once again was foiled by the elusive rapport needed between the pitcher and his cumbersome gauntlets. An ache had settled into the space just behind his forehead, and his stomach caustically reminded him that the long-ago half-meal of bread, nut paste and fruit preserves simply would not do. 

He wanted to shout with triumph when he found a bowl of apples in the ice-cab-the _refrigerator_, along with some cold meat and a wedge of sharp cheese. These, he could eat without the pathetic struggle that plagued him whenever he tried to make coffee. Scooter skulked into the kitchen, pointedly eyeing his small feast with an imploring expression. He offered a slice of apple, and she accepted it delicately. 

"Well, at least _you're _still speaking to me," he muttered, and immediately chastised himself for his foolishness. 

_A little while _slowly rolled into night. She had left him the laptop, as promised. He stared at the illuminated, mirror-like surface, plagued by uncertainty. Erin had done her best to explain the internet: _satellites _and _cables _and _companies _bounced the desired information through some invisible network like a courier relay. All he need do was _Google_.

_It's not magic, Fenris_. 

He drew his index claw across the _touchpad's _gleaming surface, unconsciously holding his breath. Nothing. The tiny white arrow remained motionless, no matter how forcefully he tapped his finger against the small, reflective rectangle. What good was _Google_, he thought angrily, if he couldn't _get _to it? 

He glared at the backs of his hands, encased in the black armor that fit him like skin. It had served him well for as long as he could remember-quite literally. The benefit of its protection had always outweighed the small annoyances he'd borne. The only time he was completely free of his armor-the only time he left himself vulnerable-was to bathe. He'd learned to hold his tankard a certain way so the sour ale wouldn't spill. He'd trained himself to carefully fan his cards so they wouldn't tumble from his tenuous grasp. These things, he accepted as Life. 

_Life_, it seemed, no longer really applied. 

The claws were snugly held in place by intricately-worked catches; he dislodged them with a practiced flick against each one, until all ten were arranged on the coffee table from pinky to thumb for the left hand, thumb to pinky for the right. He ran his bare fingertips along the wood's grain: smooth, worn. Used, and used often. The laptop was warm; that surprised him. He'd expected it to be cold, impersonal. He tapped a finger to the touchpad, and this time, the white arrow jerked across the polished screen.

His bark of surprised laughter echoed behind him as he thrust the laptop to one side and hastened back to the kitchen. "_Tertio felitae, _coffee pitcher," he growled. Third time lucky. 

A handful of minutes later, as he savored the first mug of coffee he'd made for himself, he reflected that triumph was a sweet taste indeed. And it had nothing to do with the obscene amount of sugar he'd scooped into his cup. 

Fenris tensed instinctively as the front door swung toward the kitchen. Erin stepped over her threshold and pushed it softly closed behind her. _A little while_ had come to an end. _Finally_. 

She blinked at him, nonplussed, as though surprised to find him lingering. Her pale features had regained none of their vitality; if anything, she seemed even more bent over with weariness. Guilt soured his small sense of triumph, and he fumbled silently for the proper greeting for this..._predicament_. Surely one must exist—

Erin nodded at the mug in his hand. "Any left?" she asked. 

He had made enough for an army, he thought. "I believe so," he answered. _Scintillating_. "It's fresh," he added, feeling the sentiment wholly inadequate but certain _something _needed to be said. 

Her eyelashes fluttered behind her spectacles, and the corners of her mouth twitched up and down so fleetingly he wondered if he perhaps imagined it. "Thanks." He stepped courteously aside so she had room to prepare her own mug. "'Night," she bid him farewell, and shut her bedroom door behind her. 

_A little while_, he realized glumly, had just reset. 

_A little while_ slowly froze into a brittle silence, punctuated by the empty trickle of coffee against the glass pot and the fitful rattle of metal on Scooter's collar. Fenris caught himself holding his breath against the building torrent of questions, checked by Erin's perfunctory answers and deadened expression. She came and went daily, occupying her hours with an errand she called _class_. Fenris burned to ask what this was, why it took so much time, did it have anything to do with the books and symbols he'd found, but didn't. She retreated into her bedchamber each evening, and emerged in the morning looking more _depleted _than she had going in. Somehow, she was fading—more _gone _in presence than in absence. It made him nervous. 

Google was much more forthcoming. More often than not, he found himself lost in the intangible library of _Wikipedia_, drowning in _information_. In _facts_. Drowning in _history _and _philosophy_ and _how to cook _and nowhere did he find a single mention of real, raw _magic_, except as _fiction_ or _fantasy _or _trick_.

No magic. It _couldn't _be. But it _was._

He anchored himself in this small new world with short instructions he wrote on scraps of paper. _Push. Turn. Pull. _Even without their clawed tips, his gauntlets made these basic, everyday tasks nearly impossible; he stripped them off, and stood before the kitchen sink for the better part of a half hour, letting the warm water from the faucet trickle over his forearms, bared to the elbow. 

Scooter watched him, floppy ears half-perked, as he crossed the apartment in three long-legged strides. He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, half-awed, half-afraid of the man he saw. He watched himself unhook-unbuckle-un-_arm _himself, disbelieving even as he beheld the evidence. The air in the apartment was warm, though autumn was in full swing outside. He stared at the pale blue scars of his markings, stark against his tanned flesh. He turned the knobs—_right-y tight-y, left-y loose-y—_and clean, clear water cascaded from the metal faucet. It beat against his hands, hot and immediate and _easy_. He tugged on the metal spigot, and the water diverted from the faucet to the head, dispersing into a steady spray that drummed rhythmically against the bottom of the tub.

The first touch of that hot rain against his skin was pure bliss. He wet his hair, goosebumps prickling over his skin in surprise. He sniffed the lightweight jars of viscous, colored liquids until he found one he liked, and squeezed some onto an abrasive sponge he found dangling from one of the knobs. Together, they felt as they sloughed away _years_. He stayed under that relentless, subtly violent stream long after the fragrant white lather had been rinsed away, head leaned back against empty air and eyes shut of their own accord. 

Erin had warned him the supply of heated water was finite, when she was still speaking to him; when it was exhausted, he spun the clear knobs to the right until the water stopped and stepped out from behind the striped green curtain. Bulky, absorbent towels lay neatly folded on a rack above the priv—the _toilet_. He wrapped one around himself and padded on damp, bare feet past the pile of his discarded armor and into the bedroom. 

He pawed gingerly through the clothes in the wardrobe. After the disastrous meeting with Charlie, he hazarded a guess that at least some of them were his. He chose a long-sleeved shirt of some lightweight fabric and tugged it over his head, feeling the unfamiliar material settle and stretch across the breadth of his shoulders. He found a pair of the indigo trousers he judged would fit, if not perfectly. They were dense, but soft; he pulled them on by the waistband and, after a moment's struggle with the button and a toothy fastening he remembered was called a _zipper_, they settled over his hips. He bounced on the balls of his feet; he swung his arms in circles as he prowled into the kitchen for another mug of coffee. They were easy to move in, these garments—that pleased him.

His armor, he piled neatly into a corner of the wardrobe. If Erin noticed, when she returned and disappeared for the night, she gave no sign. 

A firm hand rapped on the front door. It was his fourth morning in this place, as far as Fenris could tell. Or perhaps it had been five. He glanced apprehensively at Erin's bedroom door, drawn firmly closed against disturbances. Hesitantly he rose from the couch to his feet, Scooter on his heels. Feeling the worst sort of fraud—what manner of uncouth ingrate admitted guests into someone else's home?—he swung the door open. 

A woman shouldered her way past him, dragging a wheeled case behind her across Erin's wooden floor. He caught the scent of something heavy and floral, and had to wrinkle his nose against a sneeze. She whirled on him; his first impression was of gray-blue eyes, hot with indignation. "You've got a lot of _fucking _nerve—oh." The fury sputtered, to be replaced by curiosity so intense it was unnerving. She shook a lock of rich, brown hair out of her face, smooth and doll-like in its flawlessness. "You're not Charlie," she observed, sounding mildly put out. 

"Ah—no, I'm not," Fenris agreed carefully. 

The curious, blue gaze swept him up and down speculatively, before the woman dismissed him with a quick shake of her head. "First things first. Where's my sister?"

"Ah—" Fenris glanced at the closed door, apprehension quickly escalating into panic. _Sister? _

"Thanks!" She flashed him a grin, parking her odd, wheeled case against the wall as though it belonged there, and disappeared into the bedroom.

_What just happened? _Fenris shook his head violently to clear it. Muffled female voices battered against his beleaguered senses. The _sister_ reemerged briefly, and ducked away again with a glass of water and two tiny white capsules in her palm. Scooter stretched her jaw in a yawn and leaned against his leg in a bid for attention. He absently rubbed his palm over the top of her head, frowning as he worked through the last minute.

"—disgusting. Helena, this is Fenris. Fenris, this is my sister Helena." 

Fenris shot to his feet at the sound of his name, earning a wounded huff from the dog sitting on his foot. Erin stood shoulder to shoulder with her sister. Her auburn hair dangled in limp strands across her forehead, and the evidence of her sleepless nights was etched so deeply into the indigo half-moons beneath her eyes he feared they were permanent. She looked like the worst and roughest part of the morning after a night at the Hanged Man. But she was looking _at him_. For the first time in days, those pale green eyes were really _looking _at him. 

"Yeah," Erin said decisively; he wasn't certain if she was addressing him, her sister, or herself. She could just as easily have been talking to the wall. "I _definitely _need a shower." She spun on the ball of her foot, and with a swift whisper of movement, closed the bathroom door behind her. The water surged on with a shudder of pipes, and she poked her head back out—fully clothed, he was relieved to see. She glared fiercely at her sister. "_Behave!" _she warned, and with a squeak of painted wood, shut the door. Helena only pouted, and busied herself with a flimsy bundle of papers embossed with glossy portraits. 

Fenris watched the long arm of the clock slowly inch its way around its hourly circle. It had reached its halfway point when the water ceased. As if responding to some signal, Helena set down the papers-book and pulled her wheeled case into the bathroom. A duet of feminine chatter seeped through the apartment, banishing the last of the icy quiet. Fenris removed himself to the kitchen; they would not thank him for eavesdropping. He knew his way around well enough by now to locate a broad, flat pan and a rasher of bacon; these he left on the stove. He prepared coffee, muttering the steps to himself as he filled the pot with water from the sink and scooped the dark beans into the electric grinder. 

_Push. Turn. Pour. Grind_. Somehow, he managed not to flinch, even if the sawing whine of the grinder did set his teeth on edge. 

The pan of bacon on the stove was silent and cold, and he frowned at it. He had placed it directly onto one of the metal coils, as he was supposed to. He dusted the ground coffee from his fingertips and faced the stove. "Why won't you _sizzle_?" he muttered. 

Stocking feet padded softly across the hard floor. A fresh, sweet scent drifted over the coffee's bitter depth. Fenris acknowledged Erin's presence with a quick sideways glance—and had to look again. Kohl framed Erin's eyes in shades of gray. Her pale cheeks had been dusted with a pink powder that shimmered in the kitchen's gentle light. Her deep violet sweater scooped across her collar bones and hugged the silhouette of her body; he was looking at the whole hourglass, now. And the sand had begun to pour. 

_Venhedis_. 

A pale, delicate hand reached across the cold stove. Long fingers turned a dial with a _click_, until the crude arrow pointed to _On_. "That usually helps," Erin quipped, lips twitching. She slipped past him, and nimbly seated herself on the countertop beside the sink. She crooked her fingers through the handle of the bright blue mug he offered to her, sipping her coffee with an appreciative sigh. Bacon sizzled warmly, as the metal spiral glowed orange beneath the pan. All was well. 

Well, well _enough_. 

"Let's go out!" 

Helena's suggestion reverberated through the comfortable silence like a clarion. Almost as one, Fenris and Erin craned their necks to stare at her. By her consternated blinking, Fenris guessed Erin hadn't made any more sense from the younger woman's words than he had. _Out? Out where? Outside? _"Let's. Go. _Out_," Helena repeated slowly, as if conversing with simpletons. 

_Blink, blink_. Fenris could almost hear the swish of Erin's eyelashes beneath her spectacles, as he coaxed the bacon onto a plate with a fork. "Out—? Oh." He watched curiously as comprehension dawned, and she seemed to crumple into herself. "No, Hel, I don't think that's—" 

Helena cut her off with a quelling, storm-blue glare. She planted her hands on her hips and squared her shoulders against Erin's half-formed resistance. "I did not just spend an hour and a half turning you into a _goddess _for you to sit at home and mope. There has to be _someplace _we can go to show you off." 

_So this is a sister_, Fenris thought with no little amusement. _Or, what a sister _should _be._ Erin darted a glance at him, expression entreating. He neatly avoided her gaze by returning his attention to his coffee. Let _her _be the focus of that instantaneous ire. 

Erin's mouth worked soundlessly, until a harsh scream interrupted her. Helena pulled a small black screen from her pocket; her face twisted with displeasure, and she turned away with a muttered apology. She slipped out the front door, and before long, she was carrying on an animated, one-sided conversation with her _hand_, as far as Fenris could tell. 

It didn't seem to bother Erin that her sister was likely mad. She merely watched with a mixture of affection and confusion, as Helena's movements grew more agitated. The air in the kitchen grew still, as they passed the plate of bacon back and forth. "Your sister is a force to be reckoned with," Fenris remarked diplomatically. 

Erin grinned ruefully around a mouthful of bacon. "She is, at that," she agreed. She blew a sigh through her nose, following her sister's hands with a twitch of her pale irises. Silence awkwardly contorted in the spaces between the crunch of bacon and the quiet slurp of coffee, until she inhaled decisively and blurted, "Listen, Fenris—I'm sorry about the last few days." She set her mug to one side and knotted her fingers together in her lap. Her spine visibly straightened, and she determinedly affixed her gaze to his. "I, uh, I haven't exactly been an ideal ambassador for the modern world. So—"

Unbelievable. _Incredible._ It was one thing, Fenris reflected, to land practically in a woman's lap and subsequently sabotage a long-standing love affair. It was quite another to _receive _an apology for it, rather than _offer _one. "It is I who should apologize," he interrupted firmly. "Your relationship with your lover is over because of me." 

The gray-and-black kohl on her lids made the glacial snap of temper in her eyes all the more pronounced. "My relationship with Charlie ended because we disagreed on a few key points," she bit out. "Like where the line is between what is _possible _and what is _real_." 

Anger was good, he told himself. He much preferred _angry _to—to _nothing_. She glared sightlessly into her half-full mug for a long, tense moment; her shoulders relaxed, and she exhaled the breath she'd been holding. "And he never really got along with Scooter," she added, with a credible attempt at humor. Delicately she snatched the last piece of bacon from the plate and offered half to him. Her half, she popped into her mouth with a happy crunch. "You're here," she needlessly pointed out once she'd swallowed. "You're real. I think 'possible' has kinda taken a back seat." 

Fenris was nearly as reassured by the realization that _she did not blame him _as he was by the knowledge of what a _back seat _was. Her expression warmed with approval, when he divulged his newfound trivia, even as she teased him with the promise to make him a _modern city slicker_. He wasn't certain what to make of that. 

Erin heaved a sigh, brow furrowed as she bent her stare into her mug. Her expression eased from fatigue and resignation to thought and decision. A sweep of her lashes went a long way to disguise an analytical glance in his direction; it may have even gone unnoticed, had he not been studying her face for any telltale hint of her thoughts. 

"Okay! So where are we going?" 

The easy silence broke apart, as Helena breezed back through the front door. "Crazy," Erin muttered. Her lashes flickered towards him again, and her lips twisted. He watched her over the rim of his coffee mug, attention narrowing to minutiae of falsehood. She was not well-practiced in deceit, that much was obvious. What he could not fathom was her _reason_. She bore nearly all the classic hallmarks: an inability to meet another's eyes, an unconscious restlessness as she shifted from foot to foot. The line of her shoulders wavered as she spoke, alternating between a defensive hunch and a square openness. She waxed pathetic about dark places, bright lights and crowds of strangers; her words were punctuated by the occasional, furtive glance she slanted his way from beneath her oval spectacles. 

Realization brought little satisfaction. He had endured for four days without her aid, stumbling through the invisible wilderness. He had suffered her _knowing _of him, in the most brutally intimate way one person could know another. And _now _she thought to coddle him?

_You're late_, he thought with a humor as dark and bitter as the dregs left in the coffee pot. 

"Oh honey," Helena crooned, "of course we'll go wherever you want." She curled an arm around her sister's shoulders—a wasted gesture, since Erin had to immediately extricate herself to lock the door. 

"You have no issue with lights and crowds," Fenris stated bluntly. Together they followed Helena to the parking lot, where her vehicle awaited to bear them—he knew not where. "You are more concerned with how _I _will react." 

Erin took her bottom lip between her teeth and shrugged one shoulder in acknowledgment. "All right, that's part of it." The uneven ends of her hair tickled her jawline as she raked her hand through it. "But truly, I just want to have a beer at a quiet corner table, where I can people-watch and have it not be so creepy." 

A barrage of images crashed against his senses. Unbidden, memories of coarse wooden floors and hollow merriment spun from desperation assailed him. Stiff odors and bent cards spread in a fan. Varric laughing. The hard edge to Isabela's easy smirk. Aveline, arriving with Merrill in tow because she knew _someone_ would walk her home. Anders hunched over a scrap of paper, cramped with erratic thoughts but saying _nothing_. Catching Hawke's eye, as she watched him watch _them_. He'd _watched _three years; how many more might he have spent, had he not arrived _here_ instead? 

"I can sympathize," Fenris mused. He shook himself back to the now. He pressed the pads of his toes into the rough blacktop, inhaling the sweet-toxic fumes of _fuel_, of _rubber_, of _fast food _and air unsullied by the press of too many in a city too small for the desperate edges of _people_. "I suppose I should be grateful you know me so well," he continued, exhaling loudly. He felt his mouth twist sourly. "Next to Danarius, you may be the one person who knows me best."

Erin's eyes narrowed, lips pursed with displeasure. "The only thing I know for certain about you, Fenris," she sniffed, "is that you make a _killer _pot of coffee. The rest is just guesswork that so far, has just happened to be right." She spun away from him, neatly robbing him of the chance to retort. Helplessly, he followed her into Helena's vehicle, folding himself into the cramped back seat like a stork. 

"Shit, sorry!" Helena exclaimed—it was apparently a family motto. She reached between her knees; there was the telltale mechanical sound of release, and the seat smoothly slid forward. "Better? Okay." 

There was a marked difference, Fenris discovered, between the way Erin smoothly handled her car, and the way Helena sped away so violently her tires screamed against the rough blacktop and left wide black streaks trailing behind her. He clenched the inside of the door, fixing his gaze to a point somewhere in the middle of the back of Helena's seat. Erin, it seemed, had been gentle with him. He barely attended to the brief conversation between the sisters in the front seat, preferring to concentrate instead on keeping his meager breakfast of bacon and coffee where it belonged. By the time the car lurched to a halt, he was not only grateful for Erin's _guesswork_, but eagerly anticipating the moment he could again take solace in it. 

Even the taverns in this world were strange. For one thing, it was nearly empty of patrons. Only the barkeep kept company inside; the scant others were scattered around the veranda, seated at small wooden tables raised high on stilt-like legs. But it was quiet. And _clean_. 

"This seems—_cozy_," Helena remarked dubiously, as she trailed in her sister's wake. 

Fenris eyed the uneven slope of Erin's shoulders with renewed interest. Her features had again eased into relaxation, kohled lids half-closed as she shoved her hands into her back pockets to keep them still. "I love this bar," she answered her sister's comment with a lazy half-smile. Helena only sighed fondly, and paused at the bar to purchase a round of drinks.

Fenris followed Erin to a table in the south corner of the oversized porch. She slid onto one of the tall stools and leaned into its curved back with a small sigh. Life around him moved at a steady, untroubled pace. A couple with a dog on a lead approached without taking almost any notice at all. He saw the dim lights within the tavern shimmer across Helena's hair, as she tossed back her head and laughed at a joke she shared with the barkeep. Absent were the appraising glances, the hard stares over his shoulder. Absent was the need to ceaselessly watch his back, to keep hand close to hilt because at any moment greed would overtake caution and Danarius's lackeys would come for the bounty on his head or the pleasure of licking that bastard's embroidered hem—

Three brown bottles materialized on the wooden surface as if out of thin air. Erin's pensive gaze snapped to piercing attention as Helena glanced between her face and Fenris's. "Know what?" she trilled. "I forgot to—I'll just—you two go ahead!" 

Away from her sister's influence, Fenris watched as a part of Erin's unease returned. It was easily recognizable, in the way her teeth again sank into her lip, in the crease of her forehead as she leaned forward to rest her elbows on the small table. 

Her discomfort was contagious; Fenris caught himself mirroring her hunched posture. "Erin, I—" 

"Fenris, listen," she began at the same time. With an audible click, she clenched her jaw shut and fluttered one hand at him in deference. Carefully, she tore the paper label from her bottle of ale. "Um, you first," she offered, flushing. 

He watched her hands as she folded the label in accordance with some design likely only she would recognize. "I did not intend to make you believe I was angry with you," he said softly. He curled his palm around the cold, brown bottle, frowning as he sorted through his thoughts. Erin's label assumed shape beneath her fingertips—he thought he saw a close facsimile of a head, and perhaps a wing. "I lived in Kirkwall for almost four years," he struggled to explain. "I knew my place in Kirkwall. I knew where I stood with Hawke, with each of her companions. But here?" He waved a hand at his new surroundings in baffled illustration. "I do not understand who I _am _in this place." 

She glanced up from her project, one eyebrow arched in question. "Are you ranting or do you want my opinion yet?" she asked matter-of-factly. "I'm finding it hard to tell. 

He watched her in silence, holding her gaze as he waited for her next words. Most in his acquaintance did not hesitate to offer their opinions, and often without being asked. It figured that out of _everything _he had seen thus far, _this _would be the most familiar—

"Okay, _speak_, please? I don't speak brood-ese yet." 

He blinked in surprise. Her hands had stilled, fingers interlaced atop the wooden table. A quiet chuckle reluctantly worked its way from silence to sound. "Please, I would like to hear your opinion," he assured her. And—he would, he realized with a small, inward start. He wanted to know what she thought—this pale, polite scholar with a penchant for flippancy and a well-intentioned bully for a sister. He sipped carefully from the bottle in his hand; the crisp ale fizzed lightly across his tongue and tickled all the way down. He studied the letters emblazoned across the yellow label with painstaking concentration, and wondered what it said of the people here that they named such a smooth beer after another word for _bruise_. 

Erin took a long pull from her own bottle, cocking her head toward the ceiling with a pensive frown. The unfinished paper creature tipped to one side, as she bumped the table with her knee. "I know who you were in Kirkwall," she said at length. "Danarius's pet experiment. Escaped slave. Assassin. Mercenary, on occasion. And, if you'd not gotten dropped here, Hawke's lover." 

His shock must have made itself plain upon his features, for she interrupted herself with an emphatic nod. "Yeah, that's right," she continued with a faint smirk. "You hated all mages, hated magic itself for what it did to you in Tevinter. And always, _always _you knew you were living on borrowed time. Sooner or later, Danarius would come for you." 

Fenris breathed deeply through his nose to calm his racing heart. He knew she _knew _him; thus far, however, he had been able to neatly dance around the subject by the simple fact they had not been speaking for the better part of a week. But to hear his own thoughts echoed by a near-complete stranger made his nape tingle—it felt like _danger_. It felt like _pursuit_. In silence, he drank deeply from his bottle, and tried to quell the voice of instinct in the back of his mind screaming at him to _run_. 

"But here's the thing, Fenris," she continued, propping her chin on the heel of her hand with a toothy grin that hinted at madness. "_None of that is true here_. And if none of the things that created Kirkwall-you apply here, what's the only logical conclusion?" 

"You're drunk?" 

Her nose crinkled underneath the wire bridge of her spectacles, and she seemed to take his words into weighty consideration. "That—is a possibility," she admitted, peering shortsightedly into her nearly-empty bottle. "But not where I was going." She finished her ale and set the brown bottle carefully to one side. "What I'm trying to say is that _you get to choose who you are_, because the things that are true of Kirkwall-you _aren't _true of Texas-you." 

_Breathe_. "I don't _feel _any different," he answered skeptically. "I'm still—all of those things." _Watching. Waiting. He's still out there. _"Besides Hawke's lover, that is." 

Shamelessly Erin confiscated Helena's unattended ale and began peeling away the label; it came off wetly in her fingers and she swiftly folded it into lopsided squares. "_You _know that, and _I _know that. But does anyone else?" she asked cheerfully, and shook her head without waiting for him to answer. "Nope!" She drained half her sister's bottle in one long gulp, leaning forward on her elbows across the table. "And you know what else?" she giggled. "No one knows you're _here_, besides you and me. Know what that makes you?" 

He hazarded a guess. "Lost?" 

"Uh-uh." She lifted herself from her seat by her fingers, curled over the edge of the table on his side. Halfway atop the table, she halted; for a fearsome, horrible moment Fenris thought she meant to kiss him. Motionless, he waited for the demanding brush of skin on skin—_breathe, just breathe—_

It never came. She was close—_so_close. He could _feel _her scent pushing against him in waves of sweet and tart. Her hair was tinged honeyed red by the late afternoon sunlight as it bounced forward across her cheeks. Fenris stared at her, fascinated by the way her bright, conspiratorial grin revealed warm blue secrets beneath the pale green surface in her eyes. Secrets he longed and feared to discover. 

"You're _free_," she whispered. 

"Goddammit, Erin, you drank my beer!" 

Erin tore her gaze away from him with an apologetic shrug. "Busted," she admitted. She pursed her lips and blew a sharp puff of air across the bottle's narrow opening, making it whistle mockingly. She balanced there for a precarious moment, tipping back and forth on the fulcrum of the table's edge, before she crashed heavily back into her seat. Fenris made a swift grab for the bottle before it could spill; Helena kept Erin steady with one manicured hand glued to her sister's shoulder. 

"Jesus when was the last time you _slept_?" she wondered aloud. A note of concern—and a trace of alarm—struck true to Fenris's trained ear.

Erin waved a hand dismissively, wearing an unconcerned smile she directed toward a point somewhere to the left of Helena's head. "Last...week?" she guessed vaguely. Her expression brightened. "Broke my record!" 

"That's not something to be _proud _of," Helena insisted exasperatedly. 

"Sure it is—"

"Time to go, honey. Come on, grab your stuff—you've got your keys?—Fenris can you grab her other side—?" 

Between the two of them, Helena and Fenris were able to maneuver an intoxicated Erin into the long rear seat of Helena's car. He rubbed his palms across his borrowed trousers as he slid into the front passenger seat; the soft tickle of Erin's purple sweater lingered long after he released her into Helena's care for the evening. So did the memory of sea-blue warmth beneath a cool green surface. So did the impression of her smile, stretched wide and out of focus as she leaned close and gave him something precious and dreadful. So bright and hot to the touch.

_Lost? _

_Or free?_

Hope. It would scorch him to ashes and burn him blind, should he let it. 

Yet—how could he not? 

Fenris drifted to sleep to the scent of something sweet and tart that echoed through his dreams like laughter.


	3. A Kiss That Counts

Something was _different_. 

For as long as Fenris could remember—and in all likelihood, beyond that—his very survival had been contingent upon his awareness of his surroundings. As a slave, it had often meant treading the narrow footbridge between protecting his master as was his duty, and protecting himself from his master. _Former _master, Fenris reminded himself savagely.

As a fugitive, awareness went hand in hand with Life. _Awareness _was the gap between evasion and recapture, between the deadly whistle of an enemy's blade moving past him and the sickening bite of its edge in his flesh. Awareness was, quite simply, the difference between life, and death.

But lost—_free?_—in this new world, with no magic and no Danarius, _awareness _had changed. _Awareness _relaxed in the presence of Another, but heightened in her absence. _Awareness _meant memorizing the clues to Another's moods. _Awareness _found his gaze wandering the weary slump of Another's shoulders at the end of the day, or the shape of her lips as they curved in amusement. _Awareness _sent minute thrills up and down his spine at the merest brush of her fingers over his skin and caught him staring at her hands, wondering when they would next seek out his—

He was, Fenris reluctantly admitted, perhaps a trifle obsessed with her hands. 

He thought of those same hands now, as his bare feet wandered the rough asphalt paths of his most recent new city. He was looking for her, _awareness _stretched so sharp and taut he felt the strain of it pull against every step. The crude map of the college compound she'd drawn for him crinkled in his pocket, and he pulled it out to squint at the crisscrossing lines. 

So this was _class_, he reflected in astonishment. It was not merely one building, as he had assumed, but many. _People _spilled from every edifice in sight, bearing a variety of satchels and packs and almost-universally worried expressions. Most of the horde looked to be in their last bloom of adolescence, but he saw scattered older among them, and even one graybeard, seated in a wheeled chair with an oversized lute strapped securely to its back. He counted six stone buildings in view alone, none of which seemed to match the uneven squares on Erin's map—Maker's pity, was that actually meant to be a _building_—? 

"Y'lost, son?" 

Fenris jerked back into his surroundings. The graybeard regarded him curiously from his chair, holding the wheels steady in a practiced grip. "Yes," the elf blurted after a moment of flabbergasted staring. "I'm looking for—_archaeology_?" He painstakingly sounded out the strange syllables, remembering at the last moment to pronounce it as _ark _instead of _arch_. Bloody nonsensical language, this _English_. 

The man hitched a thumb over his shoulder at a building indistinguishable from the others save for the letters etched into the brick-and-mortar lintel. "Jackson building, first floor." He eyed Fenris from beneath the dark lenses of his spectacles, head cocked thoughtfully to one side. "You're not from around here, are you." 

It was a statement, not a question. Fenris felt the pointed tips of his ears heat with embarrassment. Not a subtle people, these Texans. "No, I am not," he answered flatly. "My thanks for the reminder." The fallen leaves slipped under him as he spun away on the ball of his foot, and stalked away without exploring the _Jackson building_ further. When Erin returned home and found him still in a foul temper, he blamed it on another day of fruitless searching. It was not _precisely _a lie, and no words needed be spoken beyond that. Unless he felt inclined to tell her he had again been made aware of the fact he was _other_, that he did not _belong_. While trying to find _her_, because he liked watching her hands dart through the air while she spoke and couldn't stop thinking about the particular way her mouth twisted when she worked through a problem—no. Silence was smarter. And if his dreams that night were less concerned with Danarius and revenge than they were with the familiar sight of her lower lip caught between her teeth—well. Such was the price he paid. 

He spent a good portion of the next morning creating his own map of the college compound. One he could actually read. Erin was many things, but a cartographer was nowhere among them. He traced from memory the pebbled footpaths and the approximate placements of the buildings he'd seen, intentionally leaving room for expansion as he learned more of the city. It was not a masterpiece, he thought critically as he surveyed his handiwork, but it would do. 

By midday, though, he felt as if the city was memorizing _him_, as his feet beat weary circles around its hub. Storefronts remained closed. Shopkeepers raked him up and down with an acid mix of curiosity and suspicion, gazes lingering on the markings. On the silver-white hair. On the pointed ears that clearly marked him as an elf. Or would, if these _people _chose to believe such things existed. Which they didn't. He wondered if he should feel comforted by their supposition that he was merely a freak, rather than what he _was_. _Whatever _he was. 

_Don't belong here—_

"Hey, I seen you around." 

Fenris halted just short of collision with a robust, bald-headed man as he stepped out of his shop. The hand-drawn map fluttered to the sidewalk, and the man bent to retrieve it. His generous gut spilled over his belt, stretching the material of his shirt beyond what Fenris felt it could endure. What he could see of the man's flesh was liberally decorated with blue-black words, elaborate crosses and a representation of that sacred woman Erin called Virgin Mary. His short, neat beard was liberally salted with gray, and he smiled politely as he continued, "Yeah, I seen you. You lookin' for work, right?" 

"I am," the elf admitted after a moment. There was little point in denying it, especially since the man seemed more inclined to _talk _to him than wave him off his doorstep. He took his map from the man's hand, taking careful note of the shop's name and placement on the street. 

"Marcos Constancio Hernandez-Lopez," the man introduced himself as he offered a hand. "But just Mark to you." 

"Fenris FitzBhanna," he returned as he shook Mark's hand. "What manner of work are you offering?" 

"These kids, they keep me busy, y'know?" Mark waved a hand at the sidewalk, at the small groups of students trudging past. "Walk in with Daddy's money, walk out with ink. Could use some help. Not hard," he hastened to reassure Fenris. "But busy. Hey, who did yours?"

Fenris blinked, taken aback by the sudden change in direction the conversation had taken. "My—what?" 

"Your ink." Mark nodded at the markings, dark eyes alight with interest. "Don't know nobody that good around here." He kept hold of Fenris's hand, turning it this way and that till the lyrium shimmered prettily in the hazy afternoon sun. "Is _real _good work," he whistled in admiration. 

Fenris coolly untangled his hand from Mark's grip, fighting the urge the scratch the back of his hand as the lyrium itched. "My former employer had—very strict specifications," he explained guardedly. "He paid dearly for the procedure." _And will pay more dearly still_, he added silently. Erin's suggestion of _going to town _on Danarius's head with a baseball bat suddenly had a much more visceral appeal, in the face of this man's blatant interest. "As did I. Have you a pen?" 

"Nice boss," Mark remarked, eyebrows raised. 

"Not really."

"Lucky for me, huh?" He ducked into the shop's interior, to return a moment later with a black-and-white stylus with the letters _B-I-C _etched on the ink barrel. Fenris laid his map flat against the brick wall, free-handing the building's lines while Mark watched curiously over his shoulder. "You pretty good," he observed casually after a long moment. "New in town?" 

"Yes," Fenris sighed wearily. He appreciated the more diplomatic version, phrased as a question, to the much more blunt _Not from around here_. "I have an arrangement with—with a friend," he elaborated hesitantly. 

"You come work for me, I pay you straight up plus a commission for the work you do. The hours're shit, but—"Mark trailed off with a shrug. "Whatcha think?" 

"What," Fenris asked carefully, slowly coming to dread the answer, "_exactly _would you be hiring me _for_?" 

"Tattoos," Mark answered bluntly. "You do the easy shit. I wanna free up some time to do the _real _shit—the _art_, man. _Yo soy artisto_." 

Fenris kept his expression frozen in lines of stone-faced courtesy. The blood roared hotly in his ears, and he drew in a deep, slow breath through his nose against a flash flood of rage and frustration. It was an offer, not a death sentence—yet he could not prevent his fist from clenching as he asked for time to consider the offer, as he promised to return the next day with an answer. Almost unconsciously, he pointed his feet towards the campus; his long strides carried him effortlessly up the steep hill that separated the college from the rest of the town. He knew where he was going this time, spurred not by the elusive, fleeting thrill of _awareness _but by a new and dangerous _need _for a voice and thoughts besides his own. For _advice_. 

For _her_. 

The shaded pathways were deserted by the time he reached the Jackson building, the campus so quiet he feared he had completely misjudged the time. He wandered cautiously beneath twisted boughs of oak and other trees he could not name. What few students straggled in and out of the surrounding buildings stared at him in open-mouthed defiance of etiquette, and he hunched his shoulders self-consciously. He spied an abandoned cap on a bench, its bill curling in on itself as it lay on its side; as soon as he could do so without being seen, he scooped it up and slid it over his distinctive hair. If only his ears were so easy to hide. 

None in the hallways marked him beyond a passing curious glance, once he was inside. The white tile was cool against the soles of his feet, as he methodically made his way past each closed door—

"—so the issue at hand here should be less 'who gets what' than 'what can we learn'. Instead it's the other way around—" 

Fenris silently pushed his way past the door and found himself at the rear of a lecture hall much too large for the dozen or so students crowded at its front. One or two glanced backwards as the door clicked shut behind him, but most remained with their eyes riveted to the figure behind the wooden podium, hands flowing emphatically as she drew the room with her through the tangled web of her thoughts. Hands that halted for a fraction of a second as she took note of him, slipping unobtrusively into an empty seat. 

"So, K-Kennewick Man belongs to _whom_, exactly?" Erin continued, rallying valiantly from her distraction. Though her gaze kept straying towards him. "He belongs to the past—but whose? He was bones two thousand years before the earliest documented evidence of indigenous habitation in that part of the world. Match him up with the maternal lineages of each of the tribes in the dispute and you get an even bigger mess, because he's more closely related genetically to nomadic peoples in Asia." A map flashed across the white screen behind her, with different colored arrows darting across the giant oval that was her world. "Does that make him theirs? Does it _matter_?" Silence gradually thickened the air around her; she tapped her fingers against the sides of the podium and cleared her throat self-consciously. "That's—um. Questions? Comments?" 

Fenris waited for the halfhearted back-and-forth to die down, for the dozen or so students to disperse in an uneven trail through the double doors at the rear of the hall. He made his way towards her; she grinned broadly in greeting, eyes warm beneath her spectacles. Had anyone ever been so pleased to see him, before? _Before_? 

The grin swiftly faded, though, when he was unable to return it. She held herself tightly by her elbows and quirked a brow at him in wary curiosity. "There's a look I haven't seen in a while," she remarked. She shook herself from her expectant staring, when he could offer no explanation; methodically she disconnected wires and cables from a plain black box concealed in the podium. "Feel like walking a girl home?" she offered casually. 

From a distant place within himself, he appreciated her continued effort to give him a choice. _Deeply_. Even if, just this once, his sole purpose in coming here had been to find her. Fenris concentrated on the quick, sure motions of her hands as she slid her notes into her shapeless brown satchel, and the relentless, savage _need _which had driven him began to settle. 

_Different. _

Silence sat ill between them, like a puppet on strings with too many limbs. Erin cast anxious looks at him sidelong, her gaze darting guiltily away when he caught her at it. She toyed with the wide strap of her satchel, long fingers bending the stiff canvas back and forth where it rested against her chest. He followed her beyond the probing stares that cut at him with razor-edged interest; he kept his eyes downcast beneath the curled bill of his cap until the hard asphalt gradually gave way to lush, manicured grass and the telltale loam-and-silt banks of the river. 

Erin paused to divest herself of her shoes and thick stockings, and tread carefully across a short dock that jutted from the curved bank. She sat upon the worn planks at its end and slipped her bare feet into the lazy, cool water. Fenris's thoughts tangled in a chaos of _danger _and _awareness _and _need_; he felt like a husk left to dry in the autumn breeze still warm and fragrant with the last gasp of summer. She fished in her pack, and suddenly _need _and _danger _and _don't belong here _didn't matter quite so much as the play of sunlight through her hair, or the delicate hand that held out an apple in cautious invitation. "I'm no expert," she began lightly, "but this looks like brooding." 

"I do not brood," Fenris shot back reflexively. Could a man come to dislike a single word so much? He cupped the apple in his palm as he folded into a cross-legged seat beside her. Minnows darted beneath the water's distorted surface, wary of the disturbance as he flicked the apple's stem into the current. 

Her shoulders jerked in a small shrug; the dock bobbed ominously as she shifted as far as was possible to make more room for him. Lazily she kicked her feet through the water, chasing the minnows with her toes. "Like I said, I'm no expert." She primly folded her hands together in her lap, and she pointedly kept her eyes trained on the tiny black fish as they wiggled their way across her skin. "So what's up?" 

She sat as far from him as could be managed without plunging into the water. Even so, he could have bumped her shoulder with his if he felt inclined to lean a few inches to his right, or even snake his arm around her and pull her into him—

_Close. Danger._

_Need_. 

Fenris set down the apple in the wooden no-man's-land between their hips. "I was offered work today," he sighed. To his amazement, he felt the snarling coil of his thoughts begin to unwind. But then, it was always thus between them. He would speak, and she would listen. It was just that simple. "It is the first—the _only_ such offer I have received." Every frustration, every rejection burned and crawled beneath his mutilated skin like malicious insects. A week's worth of barbed stares, closed doors, and firm refusals bubbled across the surface of his temper, and he clenched his fists. "_This _is all anyone sees," he continued. "A _week _of searching, and it seems the only work I am fit for is to inflict this on others." He picked up the apple, glaring resentfully at the mocking contrast between the silver-blue lyrium etched cruelly into his hand and the clean, pink-and-gold skin of the apple. Freakish and mundane. "One more thing for which I have to thank Danarius." 

There was a telling, weighted beat of silence. "Someone asked you to ritually torture people by branding lyrium into their skin?" Erin finally surmised, tone laden with skepticism. 

"No, that's not—"Fenris shot an angry look at her face, only to find her gently smirking at him with one brow quirked. _Ah_. She was teasing him. "You're _impossible_," he grumbled, perversely grateful for her predictable flippancy. She _always _teased him. This—this was _normal_. Briefly, he told her of his conversation with Marcos Constancio Hernandez-Lopez—_just Mark_. She kept her silence, only interjecting when the narrative required it. It was always thus, between them: he spoke, she listened, and questioned what she did not understand. It was _normal_. 

He thought himself fortified against her instinctive sarcasm. He had not, however, expected her to burst into a gale of laughter when he revealed _just Mark's _insulting offer. 

"You're all bent out of shape because someone offered you a job in a _tattoo parlor_? You had me worried!" She pushed her hair away from her face, favoring him with a lopsided grin that sparkled with some jest he could not share. "I was afraid it was gonna be hit man, or something." 

Temper and frustration scalded white-hot behind his eyes. "Do you not understand?" he shouted incredulously. He surged to his feet; alarm flashed through her amiable expression as the tiny dock rocked back and forth with his movements. More than one step in any direction would dump him into the water, so he tried to make the most of that one step afforded him by spinning on the balls of his feet. "I _will not_ pass this on to others! I _cannot_!" 

Erin leaned back on her elbows, still grinning at him. "Babe, you are blowing this _way _out of proportion," she chided him. "Let me tell you something about your prospective _victims_. College kids, out on their own for the first time, getting inked because they think it's _cool_. They'll ask for their Greek letters, their Japanese characters, and their tramp stamp butterflies. And you'll give them what they want and _laugh_, because in five or ten years, they'll wonder what the hell they were thinking." 

"You think I should take his offer?" 

"I think you're a grown-ass man and can make your own damn decisions," she retorted without rancor. That brought him up short. Fenris ceased his reckless pacing and gaped at her. Her smirk gentled, though her gaze was still warm with amusement. "But I also think a _tattoo _means something different to you than it does to us," she continued. "Let me show you something." 

_Danger _lanced through him, as she unfastened the buttons of her pale grey sweater and slipped it free of her shoulders. Fenris kept himself very still, prepared to bolt and yet unable to tear his eyes away from the drift of her hands through the afternoon sunlight as she hooked her fingers into her shirt collar and tugged. 

_She was marked_. 

Fenris stared in bald amazement at the swirl of knots that seemed to have no clear beginning or end. The vivid, interwoven colors seemed to turn slowly against the pale landscape of her shoulder blade, drawing him deeper into the delicate labyrinth. Almost against his will, he took the one step that would bring him closer and sat behind her. The malleable line of her back straightened, and _awareness _screamed in answer. Her skin was warm to the touch as he brushed the intricate design with the pad of his thumb. "Did you—" _forget? _"Did it hurt?" he asked, and felt inane for doing so. 

Her skin rippled beneath his fingers as she shrugged casually. "It stung a little, sure." 

He followed a narrow, crimson line through the knot, only to lose it as it passed under another thread of violet. "How old were you?" 

"Twenty." What he could see of her face twisted in a rueful grin of recollection. "I copied the design off my necklace and kept it in my wallet for six months. Helena finally talked me into getting the thing done."

Fenris could well imagine a younger Erin, cajoled and affectionately bullied into a shop like the one he'd seen today. "She does that a lot, your sister," he remarked diplomatically. 

Miniscule bumps prickled over her shoulder as the breeze shivered through the air around them. She trembled, the small motion enough to put space between his skin and hers. "M-my point is, bad decision or not, everyone who walks through that door makes a choice. Including me." Her glasses slipped down the bridge of her nose, and she smiled at him. "You get to choose, like always," Erin assured him. "You can take the job, or you can keep looking. But," she added, "don't think for a second you're _inflicting _anything on anyone. Least of all _this_." She tentatively reached across sunlight and air to touch her fingers to his markings in illustration. Truth compelled her to remind him, "And even _this _was a choice." 

He had to roll his eyes at that. "How could I have forgotten," he drawled. "Were we not walking home?" Her hand fit neatly in his as he helped her to her feet, and he kept it there. Even when _danger _roared in his mind to release her, when _need _quieted in the sound of her steps beside his and _awareness _basked in the ease of her presence, his hand remained tangled in hers. Grass and loam turned to coarse asphalt as Erin led him a brief and unhurried chase through the city that had adopted both of them, in its course. She slid free of his grip to unlock her door; her fingertips tickled his palm as she pushed into her apartment, where Scooter greeted them with an indiscriminate enthusiasm that smacked of desperation. 

_Normal_. 

She acquiesced readily when he suggested sparring. Strange that it would still thrill him so, to fit the key to his own door into the lock and step into the empty place. It mattered not that he had no furniture, no possessions to speak of beyond the half-full bottle of viscous tomato paste he'd inherited from the previous tenant. Empty or no, it was _his_. 

She had improved since their first session, Fenris noted with a small, bright burst of pride. He watched with some amusement the war between thought and instinct rage without cessation in a fierce glare the same shade as the inside of a cucumber, as body and mind fought to reach some accord of defense. She'd make a competent opponent, he thought critically, if only she would stop overthinking and simply _act_. 

"You've done that already," he scolded her, as she swung tight, erratic punches at his midriff. "Make me guess—that's better—use your feet now and again—left hand leads, and—"Her off-hand punch went wild—that _needs work_—and he slid beneath her reach. He pulled her closer by her wrist, twisting her into a stumble with his forearm as their legs tangled. 

Erin hopped against him, forehead creased in thought. "Lemme try that again," she demanded stubbornly. 

Fenris smirked. "At your leisure, _dulca_." 

He waited for her to set her glasses aright—as much a simple courtesy as it was one more miniscule tile in the mosaic of Life, _Here_. She spun like a dancer away from his controlled advance, shifting her stance a half-step to her left so that he slid past with his back to her. He whirled, and found her left fist a scant inch from his nose. She did not step but scooted closer, still leading with her left side as she nestled the ball of her foot under his instep. She curled her hand over his shoulder and half-pulled, half-shoved in an effort to knock him off-balance.

Daring, Fenris thought approvingly. But the off-side lead had left her strong hand with no useful occupation. He made a grab for it, but Erin was ready for him. Glee illuminated her features as she half-turned her wrist and broke through his grip by the thumb. She drove her right fist squarely into his abdomen, and the breath whooshed quietly from him in surprise. Success made her bold—even reckless. She hooked her left knee around his, leaving her right leg as her sole support. He knocked his leg against it, and she toppled.

He landed heavily on his hands and knees, cushioned by the faded brown carpet in his empty bedchamber and with one of Erin's legs trapped between his. The air jolted back into his lungs where it belonged, and he sucked it in greedily. "I'm going to do it," he decided. "I'm going to take that man's offer." 

One eyebrow quirked toward her hairline, as Erin shoved his knee out from under him with her unentangled foot. Her hips torqued, and she pushed him sideways, straddling him with her fingers wrapped around his wrists. _Clever_. "Which brings us to a very pertinent question," she commented. Her expression twitched into an odd, facial shrug, gaze darting to one side while her mouth twisted in acknowledgement. "Existential crisis aside." 

"Oh?" 

"Do you know how to draw?" 

The veil of auburn tresses swung across his field of vision, sending forth a shock of something warm and sweet—like fruit left in the sun. Her glasses had slipped askew again, granting him an unhindered view of two bright eyes as Erin grinned down at him. Something within him _twisted_, almost as if in pain as it reached with hungry curiosity toward some wild, aching secret. 

_Danger. _

Fenris lifted her off him, easily breaking through her amateur grapple; her glasses were knocked sideways as he threw his arms around her and bore her to the ground beneath him. That fruit-sun scent bathed him in soft waves, as his face landed in her hair. "I'm smart," he parroted her own words back to her, "capable, I pay attention. And," he added, unable to resist needling her, "apparently I'm not bad-looking." 

She twitched, trapped between him and the floor. "You're also heavy," she pointed out, wheezing slightly. 

Her chest dipped and pushed against his weight, seeking to move air against the extra burden. Fenris obligingly shifted onto his elbows; it was his turn, now, to smile into her face across a distance no greater than the width of his hand. His decision made, he felt—almost _at ease_, as if a stone had rolled away from his shoulders. He had a job—a _normal _job. He had a place to live. He had a _friend_—and he would wager good coin that after he let her off the floor Erin would ask what he was of a mind to try for dinner. It was _normal_. 

_He _could be _normal_. 

"You were right, _dulca_," he said, almost without thinking. But it was always thus, between them. He spoke. She listened. And she—almost—never gloated when he followed her counsel. 

Erin's lips parted a fraction, before curving into an uncertain, twitchy smile. "That has to be the sweetest thing you've said to me." 

"I clearly need to practice my flattery, in that case."

Her dark lashes bristled with surprise behind her crooked spectacles. The swirls of blue deepened the pale hue of her irises to aqua, glittering with merriment against the pink tinge of exertion in her cheeks. She drew in a sharp, shallow breath, and his skin prickled beneath his shirt as her overwhelming softness pressed flush against him. The sand in the glass shifted; a whisper of realization through its empty vacuum was his only warning. Fenris stared into Erin's vivid, deep gaze, and he was suddenly no longer _merely _a slave. He was no longer _merely _a fugitive, nor _merely _an elf. 

He was a _man_. A man, looking down upon a beautiful woman. 

And she was _looking _back. 

_Danger—dangerdangerdangerdanger—_

No—not _danger. _But dangerous, all the same. 

"Um, Fenris?" 

Erin's gaze flicked briefly to the ceiling as she nervously drummed her fingertips against his ribcage. With a vicious, inward shake, Fenris crashed into the here and now. She caught her bottom lip between her teeth, the gesture so familiar and _different_ in the blinding light of _dangerous_ he very nearly bolted. "Yes?" he managed quietly. 

"Whenever you're ready—could you maybe get off me?" 

_Idiot. _Painstakingly Fenris helped her to her feet. He stepped away a courteous distance, unwilling to fully surrender sense to the terrible pleasantness of her proximity. He tried not to stare as she put herself to rights; tried to purge the memory of her softness from his flesh as she tugged on the hem of her shirt; tried to forget the gentle flutter of her hand against his chest as she straightened her glasses. He tried to ignore the inexplicable squirm of something lost, as her gaze returned to its customary pale, cool green and she smiled pleasantly at him. "So, what're you in the mood for tonight?" 

_Normal_. "What is _soo-shi_?" he asked curiously. "I have heard it spoken of quite often." 

"Raw fish," she answered candidly. She seemed to savor the shock of revulsion stamped across his features for a moment, for she smirked and shook her head. "Should see the look on your face," she chuckled. "I don't mean you eat it still wriggling and with all the guts and stuff still inside—though it wouldn't surprise me if that was once part of it. We can look it up if you're curious. Anyway—" 

He wasn't, but—he _iked_ this part of her, Fenris realized. He liked that with one question, the world opened a little wider and her hands flitted through the air a little faster and she said _we_ like he _belonged_. "Perhaps we might give the raw fish a miss?" he suggested delicately. "Not that the idea of cutting poison out of balloon fish is not fascinating, but." 

"Pizza's also a viable option," she offered blandly. 

Barely a half hour later, Fenris lifted a triangular slice of flat bread from its stiff paper box to his mouth. The melted cheese dripped in white strands from his fingers; meat and sauce and vegetables created a cheerful, hot riot on his tongue. "Conceivably, one could put anything on this, correct?" he asked offhandedly.

"Conceivably, yeah." Erin brushed crumbs from one of the innumerable essays written by her under-apprentices, pizza slice in one hand and a pen tipped with crimson ink in the other. She scratched a crude arrow in the margin and scribbled a brief, furious-looking note beside it, lips pressed into a thin line. "_Do not _make me hunt for your thesis statement," she muttered crossly. "Why?" 

He did not make his reply with words; rather, he rose from the sofa and retrieved the jar of peanut butter from the pantry. Her eyebrow quirked as he spread the thick brown paste on top of the aromatic masterpiece of thinly-sliced meat, tomatoes and cheese. "Seriously?" she drawled skeptically. 

"And why not?" he retorted with an easy smirk. 

"I bet you're about to find out." 

"You," Fenris accused her jokingly, "have no sense of the adventurous." He sank his teeth into his improved slice to make his point—and had to fight not to gag as _thick_ and _spicy_ abused each other in his mouth. 

Erin had the fathomless grace not to laugh openly, though her lips trembled and her cheeks flushed. She did, however, have the sterling cheek to slide her glass of cold milk across the coffee table. She did not lift her gaze from the hapless under-apprentice's essay; the red ink scratched across the text with the same steady hand as before. But the corners of her mouth tilted stubbornly upward as she murmured, "Give an elf a pizza..." 

Fenris waited for her to finish the sentence, even when it became apparent she wasn't speaking to anyone but the air. "What happens when you give an elf a pizza?" he prompted her, mistrusting her silence. 

She did look at him then, expression shining with amusement and eyes gone aqua as she glanced at the abandoned pizza slice. "Adventure, apparently." 

The sound of his own laughter still surprised him, even after being coaxed into it so often. She joined him, finally granted leave to do so by the reluctant chuckle at his own expense and the sheer, everyday absurdity of the situation. Their echoes lingered, ricocheting from the walls long after Erin had retreated to her bedchamber and he had unfolded the clever hidden bed from the sofa. They drowned out the perpetual, metallic whine of electricity and the drone of cars on the nearby street, the moaning whistle of trains and the screaming signals of authorities as they moved from crisis to crisis. Only the sound of his own heart was louder. 

_Normal_. 

Fenris fell asleep smiling, knowing almost for certain he had never before done so. 

He awoke the next morning with Virgil's tail draped across his face. The door to Erin's bedchamber was politely drawn closed, except for a small crack so her cats could roam freely. More than once, he had been insistently summoned into consciousness by an imperious feline yowl. Erin herself would not appear until she heard his bed thump back into the sofa. A routine had been established, in the days after her family's feasting day: she waited for some clear signal he was awake before she emerged with Scooter; he prepared the first of many pots of coffee while she walked the sweet-natured mongrel through the parking lot, and the two of them moved around one another in companionable silence. They were neither of them at their best first thing in the morning. And to not _have_ to be—to simply enjoy a cup of coffee together until its essence took hold and he felt able to converse without snarling at the sun—it was a novel luxury. One he had not known he needed. 

But today—_just _for today—he wished she would simply _come out_, and to the Void with her easy courtesy. He felt as though moths flitted restlessly through his gut, his pillow smelled of cat, and he was to deliver his formal acceptance of _just Mark's _offer this afternoon. He—he was _nervous_, and he found himself yearning for Erin's sleepy drawl as she bid him good morning. He craved distraction; he scooped the coffee beans into the small grinder and wished with all his might for Erin to ask him _Howjasleep_? like it was all one word, so he could say _Very well, thank you _and he wouldn't have to _think _about the inescapable fact that _Erin _was also _a beautiful woman_ and—

And she was going to be late, if she slept much longer. With mounting confusion, Fenris stared at the half-closed door to Erin's bedchamber, wondering if he dared wake her. He only needed to endure the scatterbrained, foul-tempered maelstrom of her tardiness once to know he never wanted to do so again. Still, he couldn't repress a smile upon remembering precisely where he'd found her keys later. He flicked the toggle on the front of the coffee maker and relaxed into the sound of the dark liquid dripping into the glass pitcher. Perhaps it was _Saturday_, that week's-end holiday distinguishable from the rest of the week only by at what point in the day Erin bothered to rouse herself—

"All right, all _right_, dog—_Jesus_—" 

The bedroom door swung wide and thumped against the wall as Scooter wiggled into the living room. Erin soon followed, looking rumpled and abused as though morning had personally dragged her from her bed by the foot. She waved drowsily without looking at him as she slid her bare feet across the floor. "Mornin'," she yawned. Scooter's leash rattled, and the hound dragged her mistress through the front door. "Wanted t' sleep in a little but _nooo_—" 

Fenris breathed a deep sigh of relief, as Erin's grumbling was silenced by the door swinging shut behind her. Routine. Normal. He grabbed for the jar of dark beans, only to set them down again when the coffee maker released its shrill, mocking beep. He clenched his hands into helpless, idle fists and let his head drop against the cool metal of the refrigerator door. _Idiot, idiot, idiot—_

He jerked from his reverie of self-abuse at the sound of water running through the faucet behind him; he hadn't heard the door open above the rattle of jars and bottles and the raucous tumult of his own thoughts. Erin scrubbed her hands with a white cake of soap at the sink, cocking an eyebrow at him over the rims of her spectacles. "You okay?" 

"Do I look 'okay'?" he snapped, and immediately regretted it. She did not deserve his temper, even if her only response was a slow, sleepy blink as she passed him the sugar dish. His tapered ears flushed with shame, and he retrieved the paper crate of thick cream from its shelf in the refrigerator. He poured it into her mug of dark coffee, until it billowed back across the surface like a sail. "I'm sorry," he muttered. "It is only—" 

"'S'okay, babe." Her eyes smiled as she accepted the handle of the mug he held toward her. As peace offerings went, he could do worse. Silence rolled through the kitchen like a soft haze, as she perched atop the counter and he leaned against it opposite her. Her eyelids fluttered shut in contentment as she brought the cup to her lips, and she rested her weight against the wall beside her. There was no musty odor of decay, no empty rooms and hollow echoes; no deadly resignation or splintered furniture or the hard rap of Hawke's staff against his front door. There was just the coffee's warm welcome in his stomach and the curl of Erin's palm against the bright blue ceramic of her mug. Here, at least, he was safe. Hesitantly, Fenris surrendered to the unremarkable peace of the moment, gaze wandering of its own volition across the brief swath of ivory skin left exposed by the collar of her long-sleeved shirt—

_Safe_, he realized with an embarrassed start, was more complicated than he'd thought. Fenris cleared his throat self-consciously, and the easy quiet broke apart with an inaudible snap. "Did you—ah—did you sleep well?" he asked. He felt stiff and awkward; it was not his role to initiate the rote pleasantries but with the morning's inconsequential rituals in shambles around him he felt at a loss to do otherwise. 

Erin shook her head with a self-deprecating twitch of her lips. "Had to finish grading," she explained, cracking one eye open. "And a sorrier pile of shit I hope never to encounter again." 

He lapsed again into silence, boldness taxed by the brief exchange, even trivial as it was. He knew well the mark of a sleepless night: the half-moon bruises, while never fully diminished, had darkened with a vengeance, and her movements were sluggish—he had the peculiar feeling that only the independent will of her muscles was keeping her upright. A wholly alien sensation lodged like a rock beneath his breastbone, almost painful in its abruptness. He hoped it _was _Saturday; perhaps she would return to slumber, once he'd departed. "Where will you be, today?"

"Here," she assured him with another infinitesimal smile. "Why? Y'worried about me?"

"I worry about a great many things, _dulca_," he replied. "It would not take much effort to add you among them."

Her lashes cast feathered shadows across her pale cheeks as her eyes popped open in surprise. But then the exhausted smile returned, twitching across her features like some small, furtive creature; he would swear an oath he'd merely imagined the quicksilver flash of vulnerability, darting through the remnants of night in her gaze, were it not for the pink flush creeping up her neck and the way she could not meet his eyes for more than a moment at a time. The silence in the kitchen deepened, punctuated by the quiet slurp of coffee and the thump of Erin's heels against the cabinetry.

Fenris watched her carefully as her thoughts came awake across her face. It was obvious, if one knew what to look for. A shift in her posture—she peeled herself away from the wall and slouched upright, staring absently at the door into the refrigerator. A faint crease in her brow, the click of her fingernail against her mug, a perplexed sigh, and—_there it is—_the telltale twist of her lips as she cocked her head toward the ceiling. Her mind had risen, and he braced himself for whatever mad idea was about to come out of her mouth because her madness was easier to handle than the fleeting memory of those lips pressed to his even though she had said it didn't count but he couldn't help but wonder what it might _feel _like, if it _did_—

_Dangerous_.

The spindly arms on the painted clock inched steadily toward afternoon. Erin finished her coffee first, dumping the cold dregs into the sink before pouring herself a fresh cup. "You know where to find me," she announced airily, finishing her part in a conversation she'd held in her own head. "I've got some—" 

The smile came more and more easily to him, the more he practiced. Fenris sensed his features relax into it, as she waved vaguely in the direction of her bedroom. "Later, then?" he said his farewells—temporary though they were—and felt the smile deepen as she grinned at him. 

"Later—oh!" She arrested her departure, spinning awkwardly back into the kitchen. "Um." Her hand fell beside his on the countertop, the tip of her index finger hovering just shy of touching him. The fine, sparse hairs dusted across the back of his hand lifted, spurred into action by her negative distance. "Good luck today," she offered. The sea-league grin had faded, to be replaced by a tentative, wide-eyed tremble of her lips, as though she were uncertain of her welcome. 

Fenris curled his fingers through the spaces between hers. He brushed the pad of his thumb over the bump of the callous on her middle finger—_writer's__ callous_, she called it—and _felt_, more keenly than any blade or insult, the tension within her unwind as the lines of their palms crossed. Her grip tightened gently, and he squeezed in response. "Later, _dulca_," he murmured. 

It was a strange and mighty thing. Each _later _felt less like a farewell and more like a _hello _he was saving for—well, later, as pleasant as the rattle of spare coins in his pocket. The thought kept him company on his walk into town, and hovered unobtrusively in the unexplored recesses of his mind, as his new employer demonstrated the proper use of the ink-and-needle gun essential to the trade—and tried not to reveal too much of his surprise and embarrassment when he discovered, in intimate detail, just what a _tramp stamp_ was. He kept his attention riveted on Mark's accented instruction, while the needle droned against the anonymous young woman's flesh and in no way was he going to dwell on the narrow valley between her buttocks—

Mark handed him a pair of thin, white gloves that felt too close to actual skin to be anything but disconcerting. He waited patiently until Fenris had finished stretching the weird material over his hands, before passing the unwieldy tool to him. "Now you try." 

_Breathe. Just remember to breathe._

He could feel the heat of the woman's skin through the thin material of the gloves. The denim waistband of her trousers repeatedly brushed against the inside of his forearm as he moved the needle until the skin beneath his sleeve felt angry and raw. He followed the rough lines Mark had drawn with a pen; the elaborate design gradually took shape in the small of the woman's back but it was no pattern Fenris recognized. Flowery curlicues and scattered dots formed a shallow V, the point of which matched the dip and swell of her buttocks with sordid perfection. He moved his hand across her flesh to steady himself, and she shuddered. She craned her neck to glance at him over her shoulder with a coy flash of teeth that seemed far too predatory to be friendly.

Fenris clenched his jaw and dropped his eyes. He'd _chosen _this, he brutally reminded himself. He forced himself to swallow, to choke moisture into his parched throat. He concentrated on the separation of ink and skin before him, and tried to ignore the scream of his instincts that set off a sensation in his markings like needles dipped in ice and poison. It was only _flesh_—only a task, a means to an end. It was only a job. 

His hand ached from the unaccustomed shape and weight of the needle gun—_he __clutched the bottle of Aggregio Pavali by the neck, constantly on alert for his master's signal to pour—_

Color splashed tidily within the lines, needle buzzing against his cramped fingers—_silks __in a swirl of garish reds and golds, wine and blood flowing freely or perhaps that was only his imagination—_

Mark kept the woman's attention occupied with idle, easy chatter, leaving Fenris to his work—_drunk__ on power and excellent wine they crowd into him, talking around and over but never directly to their host's curious, deadly pet—_

The drone of the needle stopped. Fenris carefully set it down in its place on the nearby counter, surreptitiously clenching and unclenching his hand into a fist. "Done," he announced—

_ Fog Warriors—dead. Danarius. _

_ Done._

Fenris ruthlessly stifled a growl of animal frustration, as he peeled off the white gloves and the markings strained for any avenue of escape, all at once scattered and trapped within the prison of his own skin. He barely attended to Mark's chatter as he led the woman out, accepted her regimented squares of green paper currency and waved her out the door. Every inch of him felt exhausted and soiled, abused beyond endurance. But he'd done it. 

"Not bad, for your first time," his new employer commented. "A little practice, you'll be fine." He turned as the bell on the door jingled, pasting on an affable grin. Two flushed youths swaggered into the brightly-lit shop and immediately began flipping through the large portrait-book of drawings and designs on the wall. "Help you boys?"

Fenris groaned.

Night had fallen by the time Mark saw fit to release him. Fenris bent every fractured atom of his concentration to the task of walking in a straight line. Every ounce of _self _he'd managed to scrape together since his escape railed in protest against the detached intimacy in the touch of innumerable strangers. He tried to remember the shortcut through the river park, tried to track the steps he had taken with Erin barely a day before. It was better than reliving the endless, harmless, _meaningless _touches that set fires of _wrong _to the lyrium in his skin. It itched and crawled and screamed for release—but he would not grant it. His pace through the city quickened, and without knowing when he'd started, he was running. He bounded recklessly over the rough asphalt, not caring that he scraped his soles on the loose gravel or that he was more likely to collide with a vehicle than he was to outrun the stomach-churning sensation of two worlds shaking entirely apart—

He stumbled into the humble courtyard of the apartment complex, winded. Light spilled gently from windows at every level; he stepped through the shadows between the yellow-gold beams until he stood before Erin's living room window. She sprawled untidily across the sofa, feet propped up on one of its arms and encased in those ridiculous, bright blue stockings. The soft glow from the lamp beside the couch bathed the uneven cascade of her hair in a lopsided, coppery halo. She held a book in one hand; the other arm pillowed her head as her eyes darted back and forth across the page. From the relaxed smile and absentminded wiggle of one foot—_venhedis_, was the woman absolutely incapable of holding still—he guessed it had nothing to do with under-apprentice essays or the _o-s-s-i-f-i-c-a-t-i-o-n of the f-e-t-a-l skeletal system_. 

Fenris dragged the air through his lungs as he stared at her. _Awareness _stretched toward her like an attention-starved cat and _dangerous _lingered appreciatively over the way her jeans hugged her figure and he shivered as the sweat dried on his skin and she looked so gods-cursed _pretty _he forgot to—

_Breathe_. 

Waves of thick, mouthwatering aromas washed over him, as he stepped over the threshold. Something sizzled busily on the stove, sending puffs of hot spice into the air like signal fires. Scooter's tail whipped back and forth in cheerful greeting as she snuffled curiously at the cuffs of his jeans. Erin thrust her book aside and rose from the couch; he needed no more than a glance at the enraptured, curvaceous woman on the paper cover to discern what manner of literary frivolity she had been enjoying. The bitter chaos within him raged against retreat, but could not sustain itself when faced with the relentless pleasure of return. 

Panic choked the polite greeting halfway to his lips. "Don't touch me," he growled. 

She rocked back on her heels, skidding slightly as the blue stockings vainly sought purchase on the hard floor. The toothy grin broke apart into confusion and hurt with a crash like a very small heartbreak. She stared at him for a long, blinking moment of excruciating silence. But then she tossed her thick, silky mane out of her face. The soft, amiable expression iced over with defiant nonchalance. "Then wouldja move?" she drawled, jerking her chin toward the kitchen. "I need to stir that." 

His appetite curdled with shame. He could not hold her gaze, as he stepped to one side and she slipped past him without so much as a stray thread of her clothes brushing his skin. The skillet hissed as she prodded its contents with a thick-handled wooden spoon. He smelled onions and garlic, rosemary and other herbs he could not name but which nevertheless swept through the red-hot coil of panicked, futile rage in his exhausted muscles. He drew in an uneven breath, and slowly released it. He allowed the scents and sensations and the unassuming, easy disorder to pass through the jagged gaps in his anger. He didn't need it here. 

Fenris studied the nape of Erin's neck. He took a tentative step into the kitchen, noting with no little dismay how the lines of her body bent away from his approach. Her elbows were tucked tightly into her torso, and she shifted restlessly from foot to stocking foot as he neared the stove. She stirred the vegetables in the skillet with an efficient snap of her wrist; colors flashed brightly against the gray metal backdrop with a sizzle of orange and green. Only the barest flicker of acknowledgement through the concentrated expression of detached serenity told him she even knew he was there. "Ah—hello," he coughed awkwardly. He folded his hands together in the small of his back, a habitual gesture from before he could rely upon pockets to occupy his hands. He felt sheepish and wrong-footed, keenly aware he had some mending to do but not the slightest inkling how to go about it. Twice in one day seemed a bit excessive, to apologize for the same offense. "It is a lovely evening." 

Her hands paused, and she half-turned toward him, one side of her mouth twisting into an unfathomable smirk. "It is," she agreed coolly. But he thought he caught a reluctant glitter of interest, winking in and out beneath her chilly civility. 

Encouraged, he pressed on. "Your day—it looks to have been peaceful."

"It was."

"Are you laughing at me?" he asked suspiciously. 

"Oh yeah." She bared her teeth at him, grinning in undisguised enjoyment at his discomfiture. 

"To the Void with this," he bit out. Excessive or no, apologies were easier than this—_small __talk_. "Erin, I'm—" 

"I know," she interrupted with another one of those odd, gentle smirks that laughed at the whole of her wide, mad world and all things in it. "Don't sweat it, babe." 

Fenris quickly flipped through his mental lexicon of her many strange phrases; this one, he heard often enough to instantly divine its meaning. 

_All is forgiven_. 

He passed her spices and oils at her direction—she was forever complaining she was too short for her kitchen. He reached into the cabinets above their heads for _cumin _and _paprika _while she chopped cloves of garlic and slid thin slices of vegetables off her blade with her finger. There was a seductive fellowship in this—in preparing a meal together they would soon enjoy, together. So seductive, in fact, that several minutes had passed before he realized she was still taking great care not to touch him. 

"So, are you gonna tell me why you came in all snarly?" Erin asked conversationally. "Or are you gonna make me guess?" 

Fenris was in no humor to endure her intimate, frighteningly accurate guesswork. He heaved a sigh through his nose and drew a figure eight in the skillet with the spoon. The seasoned wood was warm in his palm; if he closed his eyes he could almost imagine he gripped the hilt of a blade. He tried to explain, to chase down the toxic veins of his thoughts and distill them into speech. He pressed his scarred back against the door to the pantry; he rolled his shoulders beneath his soft cotton shirt and twisted subtly from side to side, trying to scrape away the sensation of a myriad different textures and flaws pressed into his reluctant hands, gloved in artificial skin that left a dirty-sterile odor in the spaces between his fingers. "Today was—a trial," he managed clumsily. 

Concern deepened the furrow between Erin's brows, as her regard swept over him like a gentle wave. She ducked behind the refrigerator door, white teeth flashing as they worried her bottom lip. When she reappeared, she was holding a small metal bowl of pale, cubed meat, and her lips were pressed in a hard, thoughtful line. Her attention narrowed to pinpoint focus on his face; her hair whispered untidily across her face as she tipped her head to one side. She dumped the bowl of meat into the skillet with a fresh hiss of cold against hot. "You," she declared with authority, "need a hot shower." 

Fenris turned to her with a puzzled frown. "What could that possibly accomplish?" 

"Can this be one of those times you just trust me?" 

He stilled, sliding a hard stare toward her. She knew what she asked. He _knew _she knew, the same he knew she was nervous by the way she kept her movements slow and deliberate and the way he knew how much cream she liked in her coffee, almost to the drop. Had it been anyone else, he would not have even considered it—he would have told Anyone Else to go straight to the Void. But this was _Erin_. 

And—he _trusted _her. 

"All right," he acquiesced quietly, as he struggled to accommodate the breadth of the realization growing well beyond the limit of what he thought his threadbare _self _could endure. He padded silently from the kitchen, clinging to the bare floor with his toes. The bathroom felt small and close; he stared at his reflection as steam began to billow through the cramped space and he stripped free of his clothing. The hot spray scoured away the phantom, alien touches, aided by the rough sponge and white lather that smelled of _clean_. He toweled dry, the coarse fibers scratching across his markings in a pleasant, rejuvenating sort of way that lingered long after he'd pulled his clothes back on. 

Erin was still in the kitchen when he reemerged, perched on the counter within reach of the stove. She smiled warmly in greeting when she noticed him and slid from her seat to retrieve plates and utensils. She spooned the mixture of sweet-tangy sauce, vegetables and meat onto a plate she passed to him, before serving herself. But she still wouldn't touch him. She dropped her hand away from the plate she passed to him, so suddenly he nearly dropped it. Her fingertips danced around his along the length of the fork she handed him from a drawer. All this, she accomplished with a nonchalant consciousness of where _Fenris _stopped, and _Erin _began, with a generous margin for error. It would be impressive, the elf allowed, did it not irritate him so much. But what did he expect? 

_Don't touch me_, he had said. So she didn't. But it was always thus, between them. He spoke, and she listened. 

Even if, just this once, he rather wished she wouldn't. 

That inexplicable sense of loss twisted anew within his chest. Action took shape independent of direction or conscious thought. He set his dish down on the counter and closed the distance between them, only barely registering the flicker of alarm that illuminated her features as he threw his arms around her. She stumbled into his clumsy embrace, arms trapped uselessly behind her and her forehead awkwardly pressed to his collarbone. "Uh—whoa—hi," she stuttered with a nervous giggle. "What's—"

"_Dulca _please," he murmured hoarsely, "just—shut up for a moment." 

She wriggled in his arms; at first, he thought she meant to break free of him. He'd taught her to do so, after all—he could hardly fault her if she chose to put those skills to use. But no—she only turned her head so that her temple rested comfortably in the cradle of his shoulder. She tugged her hands free of her pockets and wound her arms around his waist. He felt her relax against him with a small sigh, felt the tension and surprise dissolve under his hands as she shifted and settled. 

_This _was her courage, he thought with a flash of insight that startled him. Accept first; ask questions later. This woman, soft-spoken and unobtrusively insane, raised in privilege in a place where no ruffians took refuge in dark alleys, where she had no need to learn swordcraft or survival and to his knowledge did not even learn how to mend a tear in her clothing—_venhedis __faasta vas_, Kirkwall would have reduced her to shreds in mere moments, had their situations been reversed. 

This woman, with her head pillowed on his shoulder and the scent of sun-kissed fruit in her hair, was the bravest he had ever had the privilege to meet. And the thought whispered through him like the first hint of a promise, yearned for but never once expected.

_Welcome home. _

He had held many things in his life. He had held blades of innumerable, wearying variety; had thrust his hands into piles of treasure so vast they beggared belief. He had ruthlessly clutched and torn at the insides of his foes until he came away covered scalp to sole in gore. 

But he had never held a woman. There was much to recommend in the practice, Fenris decided. His senses relaxed; he quieted the sound of every instinct screaming at him to do otherwise and let himself sink into the moment as he would a warm bath. An unfamiliar heat curled through him, lazy as a cat napping and dipping low into his belly, as Erin's softness continued to press gently against him—

_So—damned—close—_

Fenris thrust her away from him with a loud, discomfited cough. She stumbled slightly, gripping his forearms to keep her balance. Yet another apology crawled halfheartedly across his tongue, and died in its infancy as he gazed into the upside-down triangle of her face. The faint lines sharpened as she frowned at him, even as a spark of devastating comprehension briefly haunted the murky boundaries of her gaze where green flirted with blue. Her small, pale hands were stark against his black shirt as she squeezed his arms gently, just under the elbow, and let him go. 

Sharing a meal with a beautiful woman, Fenris mused silently. There were certainly _worse _things. 

Night drew slowly closer around them. The comfortable silence was punctuated by the soft scrape of metal against ceramic; by the rustle of pages as Erin resumed her book; by the steady tick of the painted glass clock and the occasional, jarring rattle of the thin, flat metal shapes on Scooter's collar. Fenris caught his gaze skating furtively across her features, her form—quicksilver there-and-gone glances as she shifted her position in the corner of the sofa, as one delicate finger flipped from one page to the next, as a flush spread over her cheeks and a smile of undisguised delight slowly brightened her face. Fenris allowed himself a singular moment to stare in fascination, as she tucked more tightly into herself and her stocking feet curved into nearly perfect arches, toes curling against her soles—_had __she always done that—?_

Fenris shook himself sternly and shot to his feet, anxious to busy his hands. He cleared away their dishes and rinsed them in the sink. His nape prickled, and he cast a swift glance at the living room to ferret out what had triggered the all-too-familiar sensation of being observed. But there was only Erin, one hand pushing a troublesome lock of her hair away from her face and her bottom lip firmly trapped between her teeth. To all outward appearances, she was engrossed in her novel. 

But her pale green irises darted toward the kitchen—one quicksilver, there-and-gone glance that met his halfway across the room. _Heat _spiked lower until it was so obvious he should have _known_—smiles and spectacles and a pair of green-blue eyes that had no business whatever being so easy to stare into—

_Erin. Lust._ The two concepts had no business fitting together. But they did. 

The electric night hummed around him as he kicked restlessly at the sheets on his folding bed, mere hours later. He rolled onto his back atop the thin mattress, fighting sleep with every meager ounce of willpower still at his disposal, and stared at the stiff, black outline of the fan affixed to the ceiling. He was not so naive as to hope his slumber would be dreamless—_ira deorum_, the day he'd had practically guaranteed a nocturnal encore in one form or another. But, for just one night, he wished to evade the familiar pageant of red-tinged nightmares. He did not want screams and blood and darkness—not tonight. Not when the memory of Erin's scent still tickled his nose and his markings sang pensively where her body had pressed against his. Not in struggle, nor even in instruction, but in—_affection_. 

For just _one night_, he wanted to remember _that_. 

He wanted—_he wanted_— 

_Whirling silks and wine and blood—the language of power here in the Imperium. Muscles screaming with the strain of discipline, ruthlessly ingrained, as he stands motionless close to hand, fresh bottle of wine at the ready—_

_A flash of purest blue among the more familiar crimsons and golds, and he knows it means she's here. Panic and shame—hot tears as he keeps his gaze trained to the floor—he does not want her to see him—she _must not _see him like this—but he cannot resist tracking the darting movement of that scrap of blue through the crowd—_

—_and then she's at his elbow, and he knows it has to be a dream because she's managed to surprise him, but he still cannot bear to look at her and know for certain he is _less _in her eyes__—_

"_So, y'wanna get outta here?"_

_It is the lash or worse to meet the gaze of a magister but she is no such thing so he risks a glance at her face and she is _smiling_, rolling a set of green-blue eyes for him as though this entire travesty is their private joke and perhaps it is, because somewhere between one dream-beat and the next, the grand hall is empty save for the two of them—_

The springs groaned beneath Virgil's almost negligible weight as he leapt onto the bed. Fenris twitched awake. "That was _important_, cat," he snarled in quiet vexation, already forgetting what _that_ precisely was. Such was the nature of dreams. 

If he had expected some momentous change in the routine he and Erin shared, he was to be disappointed. Except for her abrupt descent into feverish, manic scholarship, he noticed almost nothing different. He left for the tattoo shop after their morning sparring session; the touch of strangers slowly grew easier to bear as the days blended softly together and his hands grew accustomed to the shape of the needle-gun. He would return home well after nightfall, and was somehow never surprised to find her at the kitchen table, no matter the lateness of the hour. She never begrudged him a moment's embrace—a homecoming ritual he was swiftly learning to enjoy. Quite by accident, he found that from night to the next, they'd discovered the habit of keeping one another company through the hours of night better suited for sleep and silence. He committed the innumerable possibilities of designs and drawings of his newfound profession to memory with pencil and parchment, losing himself in menial simplicity—until Erin would slam her laptop shut with a curt, "Fuck it, I'm going to bed." 

But her eyes would soften, when she bid him goodnight. Her exhausted smile would linger, and her fair skin would flush as he responded with his own nightly farewell. The brief hours between the moment he dropped into slumber and the first cup of strong coffee the next morning were filled with fractured half-thoughts set to a visual discordance of sights both old and new, so dizzying and elusive his markings prickled. 

Something was _different_. It was _important._ It terrified and thrilled him and sent a small and powerful jolt through him every time she stood on tiptoe to twine her arms around his neck. 

And whatever _It _was—he liked it. 

Midnight was a distant memory, and the moon had already completed its silver-white arc across the black sky. Weariness lapped at his heels; the soft light visible through the living room window was like a beacon as Fenris slouched through the courtyard. Even more than the brief moment Erin would soon spend in his arms, he eagerly anticipated the quiet, mechanical squeaks of his bed unfolding from within the couch—

—which, it would seem, already had an occupant. 

With silent footfalls Fenris slipped through the front door, crossing the living room floor on the balls of his feet. Scooter's tail thumped drowsily against the floor, but she quieted when he put his finger to his lips in a silent _shush_. Erin slept on, tucked into a tight ball in what he thought of as her corner of the sofa. In the ghostly light cast by her laptop, her features looked even more drawn and gray with fatigue than they customarily were. Her glasses had been knocked askew, and a thick lock of auburn hair tumbled across her brow, the ends drifting gently in the breath from her parted lips. She looked small, young, and very fragile—as though at the slightest provocation everything she _was _would splinter apart. Using only the tip of his finger, he swept the troublesome forelock aside and carefully tucked it into place behind the rounded shell of her ear. If she remained still it would stay there for at least five minutes. 

One corner of her mouth twitched in a slumberous facsimile of her familiar smile. His palm lingered over her face, a scant fraction of an inch all that separated his skin from hers. She shifted in her sleep, and the delicate curve of her cheek was pressed into his hand. Something—_It_—seized in the void between his stomach and his chest, hot and fierce and totally without warning. Fenris froze, stunned into motionlessness even after Erin sighed in unconscious contentment and settled more deeply into the sofa. He drew his hand away from her with agonizing slowness—but not before he gingerly slipped her glasses from her face and placed them within reach on the coffee table. He turned away, and padded softly from the room. 

_It is only a bed_, he scolded himself firmly as he stared at Erin's disheveled bundle of sheets and blankets. A soft bed for a soft life that need have nothing to do with magisters and markings and everything to do with a decent night's sleep, however brief it may be. He shucked his shirt and knelt carefully upon the mattress; _Erin_ engulfed him in a sweet-smelling web, hardly waiting for him to rest his head upon the pillow. It need not be _Erin's _bed tonight, he argued desperately with himself—merely _a _bed, such as he might find in any inn or tavern or— 

—or nowhere, with sweet-tart, sun and fruit weaving a net about his senses. Fenris lay still beneath the covers, wary of movement lest it disturb more pockets of Erin's unique, tantalizing scent. He kept his breathing shallow, pleading silently with whatever faceless deity might listen for dreamless sleep. For Erin's forgiveness when she woke and found him in her bed like the worst variety of lecherous voyeur he could imagine. For _understanding_. For—

SCREEDLE-DEDEDEDEDLE! SCREEDLE-DEDEDEDEDLE!

Fenris gasped as the plunge into consciousness hit him like a wave of lightning and ice. He rolled and swung in a practiced motion with the intent of landing on his feet; he misjudged the distance from the unfamiliar mattress to the floor, however, and instead landed prone squarely on Erin's ugly carpet. He released a blistering stream of curses in his native tongue; thoughts jumbled together in a mishmash of confused priorities as he struggled to reorient himself. _Coffee-sleep-awake-Erin—_

_Where's Erin?_

Cognizance of his surroundings snapped mercilessly into place. Something—or someone—had screamed in the next room.

_Erin. Protect. _

It was an instinct as primal and savage as a killing leap for the throat. Fenris didn't pause to question it; he leapt to his feet with the grace of a born predator and charged, heedless of his state of undress or what danger he might find in the next room.

Which, as it turned out, was nothing.

Fenris watched Erin struggle with her cell phone, muttering oaths in a constant stream that was vaguely tinged with hysteria. Comprehension dawned as the last shrill echoes of the alarm died away, leaving him stranded in the doorway with no outlet for his half-formed, lethal intent. She bolted upright once she'd succeeded in her attempts to stop the noise, looking tousled and confused but unharmed. One cheek was pale as always; the other was reddened with sleep and bore the faint imprint of the couch's durable fabric. She glanced wildly around the room, hands buried in her hair, until her unfocused, sleep-addled stare found him in the bedroom doorway. Her eyes widened to behold him, gaze wandering over his exposed markings, and she blinked rapidly behind her crooked glasses as though to bring him into better focus. "Did we switch?" she asked, slumber and uncertainty making her voice tremble.

"You tell me," he retorted hotly. Relief and fury warred in his chest as he struggled to calm his racing heart. Dawn had not yet broken, yet here he was, jerked roughly from sleep by the merest suspicion of any threat to her. How _dare _she be safe, he thought with an absurd flash of resentment, mussed and pretty and staring at his every bared scar and secret as though transfixed?

"'M sorry," she stumbled through a sleepy apology, once she recalled to herself where she was and how she got there. "Didn' mean t' kick you outta your bed. Or wake you up." A look of dawning horror crept across her features, and he angrily braced himself for the tide of pity— "Oh shitting fuck ass head in a hole, what time is it?" she exclaimed in sudden panic.

Fenris blew a sigh through pursed lips. "Too fucking early," he muttered, resorting to rare profanity. But the occasion definitely merited its use. The rush of adrenaline slowly leeched from his limbs and left a headache tingling between his temples. That, at least had an easy remedy.

"You were sound asleep," he explained as he prepared coffee, "and impossible to rouse." _Not that I tried very hard,_ he added silently to temper the lie. _Or at all. _For perhaps the first time in his life, he felt the capricious favor of the gods smile upon him. He managed a nonchalant jerk of his shoulders as he continued, "The bed was a more appealing alternative than the floor." _By far. _"So."

She seemed satisfied with that answer, for she returned her attention to the white glow of her laptop screen. He knew not what mysteries it revealed to her, but she relaxed a fraction, sagging against the back of the couch. It did not take long, however, for her gaze to wander again across his markings. Fenris held still as her regard raked over him like velvet talons, up and down the silver-blue scars until his whole self prickled. "You're staring at me," he pointed out tersely.

Her gaze broke away from the center of his chest with a nearly-audible _pop_, and she had the courtesy to flush with embarrassment as she mumbled an apology. She closed her laptop with a soft tap and joined him in the kitchen. She tossed her hair out of her face—a dead giveaway she was perturbed, Fenris thought with a cynical snort—and hoisted herself onto the counter. "Been a while since I had a shirtless man in my kitchen," she remarked, too casually. "How'd last night go?"

Fenris easily recognized the obvious effort she made to treat this morning as any other: to boldly meet his eyes from her usual perch; to favor him with her customary tired smile that actually had very little to do with her mouth. He could even—though it was a stretch, considering his mood—applaud her transparent attempt to put him at ease with regard to his appearance. "I appreciate the effort, but there's no use pretending," he replied with a sardonic twist of his lips that felt nothing like a smile. As if a shirt could make him any more or less than what he was. _Freak_. "I know what I look like."

Erin speared him with a strange, wistful smirkthat ripped straight down to a deep and trembling place within him—where _It _dwelled. "Some days I really don't think you do."

What did _that _mean? 

She slid off her perch atop the counter without giving him a chance to answer. Dishes rattled in place as she nestled her coffee mug among its fellows in the dishwasher. "Try to go back to sleep, babe," she suggested, and she wasn't staring at his markings or his bare skin but at _him_. "I'll be extra quiet when I come back."

She disappeared from view, and soon the only sounds were those of the shower. His exhausted thoughts chased futilely through his mind, as he returned his head to the pillow that no longer smelled only of her—this time, with her permission. Thoughts became dreams; dreams slowly disintegrated under the scrutiny of sunlight back into the murky half-realm from whence they came. 

Fenris's mood upon waking a second time was only barely improved from the first. The white shade drawn over the east-facing window did precious little to mitigate the piercing autumn sunshine; he rolled toward the wall with a grumble, only to be met by a feline glare full of royal condescension. With a resigned snarl, he lifted himself from the mattress and retrieved his shirt from the back of the chair, Virgil on his heels. There was still coffee left in the pot, he remembered. He padded through the empty apartment, struck by the queer sensation that the very air seemed to be holding its breath in Erin's absence. Much like him. 

He sank his teeth into the apple she'd left beside the coffee pot—when had she started doing that? He studied her brief note, and a smile inched across his mouth as he traced her erratic looping script with one fingertip, quite unintentionally. By the time he'd finished what remained in the coffee pot, had left a brokenhearted Scooter in the company of two haughty felines—and managed to shake the niggling guilt bored into him by two dog-brown eyes—his mood had lightened considerably. It was, in fact, perilously close to cheerful. The dampness in the air promised rain, and he hunched his shoulders against the chill on his walk to the shop. He held the ink gun steady in his tattooed grip, slowly gaining confidence as he grew into his new set of skills. He sketched and copied designs from the thick white binder of templates, and paused for a moment to marvel at the unfamiliar voice whispering in the back of his mind of _improvement_ and _art _and—_staying_. 

But only for a moment. He had work to do.

The sidewalk beyond the shop's glass door grew slick as the day wore on. Mark kept him busy mopping up the small puddles shaken off by the slow trickle of customers. Dusk passed into night in a gray-black haze, as the wet mist deepened into a soft, pattering rain. Fenris flexed his cramped fingers and put away his gun. The colors ran in wet rivulets down the skin of his client's back, and he carefully soaked them up with the large square of flimsy bandage Mark handed to him. The painted skeleton's macabre grin disappeared beneath the field of crisp white, and he sighed with mingled relief and satisfaction at another task completed.

"So, y'got plans tonight?"

Fenris shook himself free of his drifting thoughts and glanced at his employer in confusion. "Should I?" he asked carefully.

Mark leaned against the glass counter, smirking. "'S'y'r birthday, _hombre_," he chuckled. "You forget or what?"

Tension shivered down his spine, though Fenris was careful not to let it show in his expression. "How would you know?"

"Had t'make a copy of your driver's license, remember?"

He relaxed marginally. "So you did," he mused. Though the reason such a thing needed to be done remained a mystery. "What of it?"

Mark's considerable bulk shook with a gust of laughter. "Go home," he urged the elf with an expansive wave. "Life is short—go be young."

_The only thing I will be tonight, _Fenris thought glumly, _is _wet_. _Still, he was left with little choice but to obey Mark's genial dismissal; the small bell on the door handle tinkled mockingly in farewell as he pushed into the dismal night. Rain fell in sheets from the edge of the awning above him; he hunched his shoulders and ducked beneath it. Instantly, a shock of cold water traveled down his neck and rolled beneath the collar of his t-shirt. Fenris shuddered, and curled his torso inward around himself until he was almost bent double. This may have made the downpour tolerable, if as a result his back were not immediately drenched. He soon grew tired of raindrops trickling down his backside and straightened, stoically resolving to simply endure it until he arrived at home. How many storms—how many journeys had he suffered through without _that _privileged knowledge? He was hard-pressed to think of a single one.

Music cut through the gloom in the courtyard. Fenris halted his approach just shy of the front door, watching Erin through the living room window as she tinkered with her wooden instrument that seemed made solely of melody and curves. She rested the hair-and-stick bow against the coiled strings; with a fluid, graceful flick of her wrist, a song began to take shape. It was a lively sound, even playful—though obviously not a tune he recognized. He felt himself smile in answer to the unabashed grin that spread across Erin's familiar face. "Well," he greeted her. "This is new."

She whipped toward the sound of his voice, surprise etched in every corner of her expression. "_Culpas_," Fenris apologized as he kicked the door shut behind him. "I did not mean to startle you."

He was all-too-aware of his bedraggled state, as he sensed her gaze sweep over him. Scooter danced around him in ecstatic circles as he crossed the living room to pull fresh clothes from the chest of drawers beneath the television. "Don't tell me you walked all the way home from downtown in _this_," Erin exclaimed in tones of horrified disbelief.

"Very well, I won't." His smile, never fully gone from his face, twitched back into place as he retreated into the bathroom and hurriedly changed into dry clothes. He spared a moment to enjoy the novelty of _warm_ and _dry_, as he met the calm, mossy stare of the elf smirking at him in the mirror. He scrubbed a towel over his wet hair and took a deep breath, savoring the way coffee and paper and books and Erin's unique sweet-tart scent and even dog all combined to form one _essence _of smell he could think of only one word to describe.

It smelled like—_home_.

Erin was nowhere in sight when he emerged from the bathroom. He found her in the kitchen, meticulously spreading a thick white paste onto a round cake the color of red wine. He frowned at her hands in growing confusion. "What's all this?"

She did not look away from her project, but he saw the customary smirk slide across her profile as she replied, "We call it a cake." She flicked a glance at the painted clock, ticking steadily against the living room wall, and added, "What are you doing home so early?"

Fenris shrugged casually. "Mark gave me the evening to myself, on account of it's apparently my birthday." He kept his eyes trained firmly on the finished cake; it made the half-sight of her tongue darting over the spatula much less—_distracting_. "What's it for?"

"Eating."

Fenris rolled his eyes at her unabashed flippancy. The trick to a conversation with Erin, he had learned, was to either keep asking questions until his curiosity was sated, or else wait her out for a straight answer. Patience was required, whatever he chose.

"It's for a few things," she soon relented. "Sorry for waking you up and freaking you out this morning. Thank you for being easily the best roommate I've ever had—and that includes my sister," she added. Gently she pushed a half-dozen small, brightly-colored candles into the icing and stepped away from the finished product with a flourish. He frowned at the speckled _29 _in the exact center of the cake's white surface. "And, since it's apparently your birthday," she continued, grinning conspiratorially as she threw his words back to him, "happy birthday."

Fenris stared at the decorated cake in consternation. He risked a glance at Erin's face: she was still grinning. A warm pleasure slowly bubbled to life within his chest. "That's for me?" he ventured hesitantly, hardly daring to believe it.

"You can share if you don't wanna get fat," she quipped.

"Perish the thought." _She'd made him a _cake_. _But that still didn't explain— "Why the candles?"

Flame sprang to life in her fist with a mechanized _click_. "You blow them out and make a wish." She jerked her chin at the wall beside him. "Hit the light, would you?"

He passed his hand across the light switch, and the kitchen was plunged into sudden darkness. The familiar, companionable silence deepened and spread, as the small orange flames began to dance hypnotically. "Close your eyes," Erin commanded softly, "and make a wish."

Fenris stared into her bright eyes for a long moment, fascinated by the candlelight's reflection within their blue-green depths; he finally did as she bid, letting his eyelids drift shut and abandoning himself to the current of his scattered thoughts. He groped cautiously for her hand, holding his breath and fervently hoping he wasn't reaching for her buttocks instead. But her fingers met his, and he grasped them lightly. They were deceptively fragile in his calloused grip; he could sense her, still smiling at him through the dim light—always smiling—and the thought came alive with a burst as he bent over the cake and exhaled in a rush—

_I wish to kiss you_.

If anything, the abrupt darkness sharpened his senses—almost to a razor's edge. The soft pad of Erin's thumb brushed across the back of his hand in a small arc, slipping beneath the cuff of his long sleeve. Fenris trembled at the not-unpleasant shock of even that negligible intimacy, and he tightened his grip for a lightning-swift moment before he released her. "Now what?"

He felt her smirk at him through the dark. "Now we eat it."

He restored the light in the kitchen with a casual flick of one finger, laughing without reservation. He should have seen that coming. He stepped in circles around her as she retrieved a large knife and a short, metal coil attached to a handle. "Cake and wine for dinner," he chuckled. "I think I like birthdays." He watched her struggle to open the first of _three _bottles of wine, one brow raised interrogatively. "One bottle would have sufficed," he remarked as he studied the labels of the remaining two bottles.

"Call it a head start." Her cheeks flushed slightly with embarrassment as she handed him the bottle in defeat. "I thought it could be a sort of project, while you're stuck here," she explained. "Trying to find a wine that tastes like Aggregio Pavali. Failing that—" She shrugged eloquently, as if the gesture could encompass any and all possibilities of vintage. "Hopefully you'll at least like one of these."

Memory twinged from somewhere deep within Fenris's psyche—from some ephemeral _place _where he kept all the things he wished to forget, but couldn't. "How long have I been with you?" he asked, barely above a whisper. Time moved differently here, so it was difficult to be certain, but— "How long have I stayed here, in this place?"

Erin paused her habitual fidgeting. "About a month," she replied breezily, after a moment's thought. Her flawless, unwonted stillness was, in truth, rather unnerving. Almost as if, for the infinitesimal space it took her to think, she wasn't even there. "Why?"

Absently he sniffed the cork he wrested from the bottle—no Aggregio there. Memory, once roused, proved difficult to subdue. He remembered with deadly clarity the blood and screams. The dead stares of accusation. Danarius's imperious, crimson-mouthed command—and the grainy finality of the sand beneath his feet as he bounded away in entirely the opposite direction. He'd sealed his fate, that day. He'd been marking off days with a knifepoint in one of the walls in his mansion's cellar, counting down days and settling for one of the other vintages—if it could be called _settling _when any one bottle was easily worth more than he was—while he waited for the moment he could begin his celebration of oblivion at the bottom of that _one last bottle—_alone. In the dark. With no cake. No Erin grinning at him through light and shadows, even though she _knew_—

He barely repressed a shiver of unease as the storm began to prowl in the sky overhead on thunderous paws. This was infinitely preferable. "I think," he said, slowly. "I think I _escaped _today."

There was an eerie, self-contained quiet in her movements, something brittle in her smile, as Erin passed the handle of the knife to him and stepped away from the red-and-white cake. "Look on the bright side," she advised him cheerfully. "That last bottle of Aggregio will still be waiting for you when you go back."

"How did you know I had—" He realized his mistake in asking before he'd finished the question, as her eyes darted to the plain black box resting unobtrusively beside the television. "Ah," he sighed. "Of course." The blade of the knife glided seamlessly through the cake; he popped an experimental finger's length of crumbs and icing into his mouth. His eyelids fluttered as the rich confection slid over his tongue—but he refused to allow himself to be distracted. He stared pensively as a gratified smile tried to inch its way across Erin's lips, but faltered. "Is that how you see me, then?" he asked bluntly. It was time to settle this. "A phantasmal disruption? And yet, you are in no hurry to be rid of me. Which is it?"

She scratched at an imaginary blemish on the counter's surface. "It isn't that simple," she stammered. A troubled furrow gradually deepened in her brow, as she continued to scrape her thumbnail across a precise square inch of countertop. "You're not supposed to _be_ here," she managed in a tormented whisper. "And yet you _are _here. You live in Danarius's _shithole_—" she spat the word— "of a mansion for six-odd years and never clean it, but you can't _stand _it if I leave a dish out. _Hawke's _supposed to teach you to read and you're supposed to _be _with her, and then you-get-your-memories-back-butyoulosethemandyou_ leave _her—but you're what? Reading fucking _Dickens _now?"

Her voice had risen steadily, making the climb into frustrated hysteria with the uncanny ease, and she had begun to pace. Every spin on the ball of her foot seemed to dizzy her. She glared accusingly at the displayed spine of the book spread on one corner of the coffee table, as if it were at fault. "I _hated _Dickens," she muttered. "You're reading Dickens and grabbing my hand and rolling me around on the floor on a daily basis."

Lightning sparked against the heavy clouds, turning the night almost violet-blue with light. Fenris watched her from the kitchen, as she spent her ire and sagged in exhaustion on the edge of the coffee table. She scrubbed the cuffs of her sweater across her cheeks; it was not hard to imagine he saw faint tear stains upon the soft, pale contours of her face. Irritation sputtered and coughed into life, and instantly began to die. He felt a bit like a bully, even if he _was _relieved she was no longer too _still _with _thought_ and _knowledge_ he was only beginning to grow accustomed to. And he rather enjoyed this _Dickens_. "So let me be certain I understand this," he surmised curtly. Glass clinked roughly together as the red cascade of wine flowed into a glass. "You're 'all bent out of shape'—that was the phrase you used, yes?—because I'm _not _an illiterate slob who can't bear to be touched?"

Erin curled into a tight ball on the coffee table's edge and rested her chin on her knees; how she kept her balance was anyone's guess. Her shoulders hunched, and she muttered, "When you put it like _that _it sounds—"

"Ridiculous?" he suggested, the sharp edge to his tone not yet dulled. "_Ira deorum,_ _salve me ex hac vesania pulchra._" Wine threatened to spill over the confines of the glass as he pushed it into her reluctant hands. The bottle would serve well enough for him. He drank deeply—and immediately regretted it. His expression twisted, and he shook his head despairingly. "_Venhedis, _not even close. You didn't answer my question," he persisted, once he'd recovered. Thunder rolled hungrily, sharp claws of sound raking viciously across his hearing. "Which am I?"

Erin stared sightlessly into the red pool of wine cupped between her hands. "You're just—_you_," she confessed, sounding uncharacteristically helpless. "And I'm all bent out of shape because I don't know what that _means_." She brought the glass to her lips and drained half its contents in one long gulp. "Oh, _Jesus_," she shuddered, nose crinkling. "Swing and a miss. _Wide _miss."

Fenris traced rough circles in the air with the bottle, making the liquid inside swirl. It was no Aggregio, certainly—dryer and lighter than he would have chosen for himself. More like an idea of a wine than a fact. Once he moved past its startling bitterness, however, he found he could appreciate it. "It isn't so bad," he assured her. Gingerly he pushed aside a pile of her treatises and articles, and took his seat beside her. She shifted, leaving a few inches of empty space between her shoulder and his almost out of habit, and he allowed the scant remainder of his temper to drift away. "It bothers you, doesn't it," he said rhetorically. "Not knowing the _meaning _of things?"

Erin twitched away from him, staring at him askance as though she mistrusted his expression. "You—you aren't angry?"

He favored her with an implacable smirk. "I asked first."

She stared at the faded lacquer streaked across her toenails. He hadn't thought it was possible, but she drew even more tightly into herself. "Yes," she forced out at length. "Yes, it does bother me."

A quiet, affectionate smile tugged at the corners of Fenris's mouth. "_Vishante_," he swore mildly, "getting a serious answer out of you is like pulling teeth." _But worth it_. The wine was growing on him, he decided, as it rolled down the slope of his tongue. Erin finished what was left in her glass; her fingers brushed his as he passed the bottle to her and that _It _all but purred at her touch, inaudible as it was inescapable. His thoughts tangled and blurred. Memories of Kirkwall bled through the vulnerable cracks in reality into the present, and he felt his smile fade. Too many nights spent slowly crawling into the bottom of a bottle; too many mornings spent trying to crawl back out before someone commanded his attention for Maker-only-knew what. So much time spent hiding and running—that's all Kirkwall _was_, in the end. Hiding in plain sight and trailing in Hawke's wake as she dragged any who followed her into disaster.

And here was this woman, vexed and brilliant and inexplicably _sad_, who had made him feel more at home in _about a month_—and he'd lay down odds of sheer absurdity she knew _exactly _how long he'd been here—than any soul in Kirkwall had or ever could, no matter the passage of years. A small glimmer of comprehension awoke, much later than it should have. Erin Campbell, who always gave him a choice—Erin Campbell thought he would choose to _leave_. "You asked once if Kirkwall was ever my home," he said quietly. "My answer was no then, and it's no now. I was a _slave_, Erin," he struggled to explain. "An escaped slave living in the City of Chains. You've seen the statues, yes? Can you imagine what it was _like _for me," he asked when she nodded mutely, "walking under those _every day_? To live in my former master's house, walk where he walked, sleep where he slept?" It was a futile, wasted question—she had been _born _free, in a country that reveled in freedom. What did _she _know? "Of course you can't. You can't imagine what my life _was_. I would have left and moved on long ago, if it hadn't been for my debt to Hawke," he admitted. "She taught me to read, it's true. But do I _miss_ her? That was going to be your next question, no?"

He tipped the end of the bottle towards the ceiling and finished what was left. White-blue light burst through the shroud of night and broke across the hard floor. The bottle made an empty, hollow sound as he set it aside. "No." It was merely a word, but _It_ transformed it into something so much larger and it felt so _good_ he said it again. "No, I do not miss her."

The sound shook down from above with a concussive rip, loud enough to feel in his very soul. The bottle fell to the floor with an almost musical crash. The small apartment was plunged into absolute darkness as the electric lights winked out. Scooter dove beneath the coffee table, whimpering. Erin choked on a frightened scream and threw her arms around him, breathing erratic and labored. Fenris fumbled for her waist and pulled her closer, close enough to feel her heart fluttering wildly against him through their clothing. "Talk to me, _dulca_," he begged. "Anything."

He listened raptly as she spun tales of explorers and deserts, of magic letters fixed within the blood of all living things, ancient hunters and ape-like predecessors; he clasped her tightly while she shook through explanations of strange, arcane phrases like _genetic drift _and _central limit theorem_ and promised, with uncanny certainty, that magisters would one day be "useless, limp-dicked idiots". Her wrists rolled against his shoulder blades and he smiled faintly into the curve of her neck as he pictured the flight of her hands behind him like kites dancing—

And then with an almost-inaudible buzz, the lights surged back on. No longer were they two kindred souls, abandoned in the dark. The light gave them back to themselves, and without warning they were two separate beings again, man and woman. Fenris's eyes flew open—when had he closed them?—as Erin's familiar shape pressed intimately against him. He swallowed nervously as he realized she was still wrapped tightly around him, that he still held her by the waist and her backside was still nestled comfortably in the cradle of his thighs. He cleared his throat and said the first thing that came to mind. "Ah—hello."

Absurd thing to say to a woman sitting on one's lap. But this was _Erin_. So it did not surprise him a whit when he felt a giggle tremble through her as she drummed her fingertips against his spine. "Hi," she answered. He felt her cheek dimple against his shoulder, and he smiled in reply. "Um—come here often?"

Her hair tickled his nose as he huffed a brief laugh. "Mind your feet," he cautioned, as he helped her to stand. The bottle green glass lay scattered chaotically across the floor; he sensed her gaze follow him as he fetched a broom and swept the jagged mess into the garbage. He closed his fist around a second bottle of wine and ferried his cake into the living room. All the while, her eyes did not stray from his face. "You're staring at me again," he observed.

She offered a one-shouldered shrug of acknowledgement. She scooted over on the sofa to make room for him—but not as much as she once did. _Different. _"I'm afraid you'll disappear if I blink, or look away," she admitted quietly. She sipped cautiously from the bottle and passed it back to him. "I'm afraid you won't be here in the morning."

_So stay_.

Fenris stared hard at the wall behind the television, unable to meet Erin's gaze for fear his expression would give away too much. It was the obvious solution, elegant in its terrifying simplicity. The soft wool of her sweater barely brushed against his cotton-clad shoulder, but it was _closer_. He had shared a bottle of wine and held her in his arms and shivered in fear with her. _It _wasn't simply _different_; _It _had _changed_.

"Well," he said slowly, "we have all this cake, and all this wine. If we ration them carefully we should last until morning."

Erin grinned into his t-shirt, and he pulled her shoulders against him in a lopsided embrace. He pressed his cheek into her hair and breathed in her scent; he couldn't stop a fond smile as he felt the idea jolt through her bones. "And we have all these Disney movies I promised you we'd watch," she remembered. "In the interest of demonstrating what passes for magic in our tragically-deprived realm." She pulled a flat, mirror-like disc from a slender box and slid it into place. Shapes and light flickered into place across the television's black screen, and he watched curiously as an invisible hand turned the pages of a painted book atop a pedestal. "We'll start at the top."

"_Once upon a time..."_

They were not complicated stories, these fairy tales. Simple almost to the point of insulting any being possessed of a shred of sense. Towers and monsters, courtiers wooing maidens with a gentle song. Exiled princesses—for they seemed to be unilaterally female—were restored, reunited with their beardless swains, and the whole of the world seemed to forgive the silly chits' idiotic folly—really, who believed such rot as a _magic apple, _anyway? Still, he had to admit there was a deep, savage beauty in watching the villain of the piece come to a grisly end at the bottom of a cliff. Almost as if by watching, he could vicariously right some of the injustices magic had wrought in his own life.

_Including your arrival? _

It was a thought as soft as the barest touch between two pairs of lips that somehow unraveled the blackest of enchantments and set everything aright again. One kiss, and evil was simply—_undone_. One thought, and the foundation of his very _self _trembled threateningly, and he couldn't even say with any honesty whether he thought it was a _bad _thing. The invisible hand scrawled _Happily ever after _across the screen in elaborate loops and Erin's toes curled against the balls of her feet as a smile illuminated her features—

He drew the line at dancing, singing fish, however. Without a word Erin halted the picture's progress, when he could finally bear no more, and declared it a good time for a pause in the evening's quiet revels. The storm had long since begun to abate; only the irate tapping of raindrops against pavement remained.

Foolish to still be so afraid of light and sound, Fenris chided himself. Erin rose and closed the bathroom door behind her for privacy's sake, one hand on the walls for balance. Her absence was a trifling thing, but it left a discordant hollow in the place where she'd been, with only the ever-more distant rumble of thunder to fill it. His skin began to itch with disquiet, and he fought against it with the only weapon left to him. "What's wrong with Dickens?"

"Sorry?"

"You said earlier you hated Dickens," he reminded her. "Why?"

Her answer was muffled by the sound of water rushing through pipes. "Required reading. Y'wanna ruin a book, you _make _kids read it and then ask what the author meant by this or that when really all the man wanted was to tell a goddamn _story_. Y'know he originally published in newspapers? Made more money that way—"

"Forced to read," he interrupted dryly. "Truly your life has been full of hardship."

The door squeaked open in the stricken silence that followed. Erin emerged and stepped to one side as he took his turn. "I didn't mean—" she started to apologize.

"I know, _dulca_." He smirked, expression gentled by the lingering pleasure of _It_, still ebbing and flowing like a fathomless ocean within him. "I am only teasing you."

Far from being offended, she returned his smirk with an aquamarine sparkle of surprise. "Didn't think you knew how."

She continued to reply blithely to his inane chatter; he traced the sound of her voice on the other side of the door as she moved from the bedroom to the living room. She was dressed for sleep by the time he emerged: brightly-colored stars winked at him from the soft black fabric of her loose trousers, her arms left bare by the short sleeves of her cotton shirt she wore in place of her customary sweater. Music drifted through the apartment, and as he swept her inelegantly into his arms the thought bubbled to the surface of his intoxication that her merry laughter was the best sound he'd ever heard.

"—_don't got a lot to say but there's something about her—"_

They whirled through the living room and into the small kitchen. Fenris spun her in a clumsy circle and reluctantly released her hands. Erin gripped the edge of the counter to keep her feet, beaming at him with an infectious, drunken glee. He grinned back, all at once feeling very foolish and not caring in the slightest. He blamed the wine.

He folded his arms loosely across his chest, watching Erin's hands as breakfast—using the loosest possible definition of the word—sizzled warmly on the stove. The cork popped free of the last bottle of wine, and he tried not to stare at the graceful, vulnerable curve of Erin's throat as she drank her fill. "Why a kiss?" he finally wondered aloud. "It seems an odd thing, to endow such a small token with such power."

She half-turned and gave him a superior look down her nose—or tried to, considering she was thoroughly inebriated and half a head shorter than he. "It's _true love's _kiss," she reminded him with an emphatic flourish. "Big diff'rence."

"I—still don't understand."

Erin's teasing leer turned pensive; she swayed on her feet as she stirred the bacon in the pan with a wooden fork. "I think th' idea is that true love is more powerful than any curse," she finally explained. From his vantage point beside her Fenris could see her countenance soften wistfully; it was a very _private _expression, in that the very _essence_, the _Erin_-ness of it shone through her skin and called out to something hidden in the heart of him. "It's a nice thought," she continued, "that love can be magic, in its own way." She shrugged, and dusted breadcrumbs from her fingertips as she waited for the toaster to pop. "I've never been trapped in a cursed sleep, however, so I dunno."

"It's certainly something to think about," Fenris allowed. "In the unlikely event that that happens." He shook his head to clear it of unbidden, dream-edged images: himself astride a snowy destrier; Erin wearing a maiden's smile as she woke to his kiss—_dolt_, he scolded himself. A less likely _damsel_ didn't exist. "How long until dawn?"

She cocked her head at the ceiling, calculations ticking across her face. "At least two more movies' worth—maybe more," she amended with a twist of her mouth. "If you're still in the mood, that is."

The bread sprang from the toaster with a quiet rattle. He slanted her a look of incredulous amusement as he scraped butter across the warm surface. "Am I still in the mood to watch a movie with a beautiful woman over breakfast and wine?" he laughed. _Choices, indeed_. Affection welled up within him like a spring—not an unpleasant sensation, now he'd gotten used to the idea over the course of two bottles of wine and was cementing it with a third. "You're not unintelligent, _mella_, but sometimes you ask truly daft questions."

Erin bit down hard on a broad smile; she shuffled from foot to foot as her toes curled tightly against the hard floor. _Interesting_. "Wow," she managed, Texan drawl more pronounced for the transparent attempt at sarcasm. "From beautiful and smart to daft in about a second. I may swoon."

Private humor shimmered with heat through the air. The space between them seemed much smaller than it had been—he didn't remember stepping closer to her but could not say the thought of _close _bothered him. "It's been known to happen."

"—_don't take a word, not a single word go on and—"_

Erin swayed away from him with a self-conscious cough and held up the wine bottle for his perusal. "So, how'd I do?"

Fenris studied the label thoughtfully and smiled at her in reassurance. "Rather well, in fact—you know how to pick a decent wine. But were any of them Aggregio?" He plucked the bottle from her hand and tipped it to his lips. It was sweeter and smoother than the other two she had selected—rather like ripe grapes and butter, he thought. He shook his head with an apologetic shrug, sorry only that he would likely never share that Last Bottle with her. "I'm afraid not."

_Your company is better_.

Only Erin's hand in his kept him anchored in the present as the next tale unfolded: a life stolen by magic; a man transformed into an animal in nature as well as appearance at the whim of a capricious witch. But that wasn't the point. The _point_ was the lowborn beauty who, at the moment just before all was truly lost, could reduce the enchantress's curse to so much ephemera. The _point_ was the change as gradual and natural as a river's march to the sea; it happened so slowly Fenris wasn't truly aware of it until it had stopped. Somewhere between the moment the bookish heroine threw herself upon the questionable mercy of her monstrous host and the instant her whispered confession of love shattered through the boundaries of matter and magic, Erin's head had come to rest against his shoulder, her breathing so deep and even that but for her determined effort to blink he would have thought her asleep. He raised his arm, and she settled into the space beneath it like a missing piece. It was powerful and terrible and when she rose to change the disc it was all he could do not to snarl and snatch her back to him—

"Penny for your thoughts," Erin gently broke the silence.

Fenris slid his fingers into the V-shaped spaces between hers, and she folded back into place beside him. "As soon as I understand them, _dulca_, you may have them for nothing," he promised. 

Dawn did not break but rather faded. The blacks and indigoes of night gave way to gentle grays and pinks. Fenris shook free of his sleepless trance as Erin pressed a button on the rectangular wand that controlled the television. The progression of images halted; a thought—the _same _thought—passed between them that needn't be spoken aloud to be heard. Hand in hand they stepped outside and climbed the concrete stairs behind the honeycombed building. He could feel the dampness soak through his jeans as he sat, but found it hard to care. It was difficult to concentrate on anything beyond the pleasant, silken softness of Erin's hand in his. The sparse clouds overhead shimmered in the rising sun; rays of light sparkled across the asphalt and wet grass, pinks and golds thrown every which way across the sky.

"I think I understand now," he murmured. "Magic. Or what passes for it here. You don't have a Fade. You don't _need _a Fade. You can do magic without it." He had known _magic _all his life: as a weapon, as a force—but never as _inconsequential_. In all the tales, whatever its incarnation or purpose, it made no difference. Because by the end, the _magic _mattered so much less than its _undoing_, than the thought that it _could _be undone. _That_, here, was _magic_. "And that _terrifies _me."

Erin was silent for a long, pensive moment. She stared sightlessly at the ripple of light peeking beyond the curtain of clouds, brushing the pad of her thumb back and forth across the back of his hand almost unconsciously. "Ancient peoples believed certain times of day were powerful," she finally replied. "Sunset. Sunrise. Times like this." She turned to him, and the smile twitching at the corners of her mouth made her eyes shine with hopes and secrets behind the reflective surface of her glasses. "I think they were on to something."

Fenris breathed in the cacophony of rain and the sweet-tart warmth that was hers alone, and gathered his meager courage for what came next. "_Dulca_?"

"Yeah?"

"I think you have my full attention."

Her pale skin glowed pink as the negligible distance between their faces shrank even further—

_Y'gotta—_

Fenris's eyelids fell shut and then there was only the sensation of his mouth carefully touching hers—

_—kiss—_

Her lips were petal-soft, dusted with the barest traces of cake and wine; he cradled her cheeks in his palms and let his mouth rest there for a heart's beat, then two, then a thousand, for all he knew—

_—the—_

She was smiling when he finally slid away; she was still _Erin_, yet an Erin irrevocably altered by the soft, hot feeling smoldering like an ember beneath his breastbone—

_—girl_.

A more charming man would immediately spout effusions and odes to her beauty—or at least _mention _it. A bolder man would kiss her again—he would explore that soft mouth until he'd had his fill. But all he was, was _Fenris_. And all _Fenris _could manage for this new Erin, as if granted the chance to meet her for the first time, again, was, "Hello."

Mere hours ago, it had seemed like the most ridiculous, banal thing a man could offer in speaking with a beautiful woman. But because _a beautiful woman _was also _Erin_, it was perhaps the only thing he needed to say. The shine in her steady gaze deepened, and her smile trembled with silent laughter. "That one count?" she asked teasingly.

His answer was ready before she had even half-finished the question. "Absolutely."

He spent the remainder of the morning in a stupor of contentment. Erin fit snugly against him, leaning on his shoulder as together they staved off exhaustion. He felt as though he were engulfed in a warm, dry cloud; he sank into the sofa cushions and let his arm rest where it draped over her shoulders, fingertips idly brushing her arm in what was unmistakably a caress. There was peace here, even pleasure—an intimacy that affected him far more powerfully than what could be found in any carnal embrace. So he believed, anyway, lacking anything for comparison—

Fenris dragged his errant thoughts back from their inevitable conclusion and rose from the sofa for more coffee. A glance at the clock told him it was near the time he was due at the tattoo parlor. A quiet dismay descended, but was immediately dissipated as Erin joined him in the kitchen. Her movements were slow with the same fatigue that plagued him, but steady, as she fetched a white paper cup from the pantry and poured the black, slightly burnt coffee into it. "Coffee to go," she bid him farewell with a sleepy grin.

Warmth spread through him, and he squeezed her free hand as he accepted the tall cup. "Later, _dulca_," he murmured. He stepped out into the early afternoon sun, his heart light, until regret weighted down his strides and he once again cursed himself for a fool.

He should have kissed her again.

Mark smirked knowingly as the elf shuffled into the shop, pulling deeply from his sweet, black coffee. "Good birthday?" the man asked rhetorically.

The empty cup dropped into the wastebasket with a rustle of plastic. Fenris couldn't help but smile at his employer as he answered, "I think I can safely say it was the best birthday I've had."

The shop was mercifully quiet—not a single client disturbed the easy hush that had fallen. Fenris took the opportunity to further explore the white notebook of tattoo designs, copying them onto scrap paper. He lost himself in the drift of the pencil upon the clean, white field, until Mark glanced over his shoulder. "Pretty girl," he remarked curiously. "Who is she?"

Fenris frowned at him, confused, until he realized that instead of the cluster of peacock feathers he thought he'd been copying, he'd drawn the faintest outline of a fine pair of eyes and a delicate jawline, graced with a bright smile that camouflaged a defiant chin—_Erin_.

_Venhedis_. "My—my roommate," he replied, recalling the term she'd applied to him the night before. How she had been captured on the page escaped him, but it felt strange to leave the sketch half-finished. He followed the lines and contours of her face, surprised to find it had been etched in exact detail upon his memory—and deeper.

"Damn," Mark whistled, in that odd, Texan way that transformed one syllable into two. "Knew you were good."

Night crept down from the heights of a sky emblazoned with vivid sunset colors. The darkness did little to disturb the pervasive sense of well-being that had remained with Fenris all day; he continued his work, copying the templates from the binder while his thoughts wandered unchecked. More often than not, he found Erin's penciled smile glinting at him from the page. Somehow, he could not find it in him to object.

Mark released him to the night, and Fenris took his time on the trek home. All day, he'd relived that parting moment in Erin's kitchen, swinging from determination to hesitation and back again. Was he even permitted more than a single kiss? None of her animated children's tales had specified. Certainly she was willing enough to welcome him home with an embrace; might that be expanded upon? Would she _expect _a kiss from now on?

Most importantly, would it be so terrible if she did?

There was an unaccustomed bounce in his step as Fenris hopped lightly over the low cement wall that separated the parking lot from the street beyond. A dog barked, and he turned a smile toward the stars scattered across the sky like grains of sugar. He _would _kiss her again, he thought. Just breeze through the door and—

The dog's throaty, staccato alarm struck a discordant note in his current fugue of dazed happiness. He knew that furious, baying call. Had heard it once before. And if Erin's mottled hound wasn't barking at _him_, then—

Fenris's long strides made short work of the intervening distance between himself and the courtyard. Long-dormant sensations crawled to life as he drew nearer to the front door, hot and toxic currents within the twisted pathways of lyrium seared into his flesh. The ragged edges of his instincts clicked into place with brutal efficiency.

_Magic. Danger._

_Run._

And then, slicing through the night like a stiletto's edge, came the scream. A flash of hottest blue darted across the narrow gap between Erin's living room curtains. Fear—dreadful, instant, and wholly on the behalf of someone who _about a month _ago did not even matter—spiked through him, colder than winter, at the thought of what that scream _meant_.

_Erin._

The door crashed open almost before he'd laid a hand on the knob. Erin sprawled on the unyielding floor, eyes shut and ominously still. A spectral shape crouched beside her, incorporeal hands limned in white-blue flame Fenris knew only too well. Hands that plunged _through _her flesh, again and again as though seeking purchase on her bones and growing angrier at its repeated failure to find it. It—calling it a _he _would be an injustice—roared demons' vile nonsense in twain, furious voices and received no response from the unconscious woman held at its mercy.

_Erin. Protect._

_Too late—_

Rage—real, perfect _rage_ was not red, as some believed. It was white—clean, static white except for a pinprick focus that turned darker than the inside of a dead sun. Erin's motionlessness was as a horrible blasphemy, her body and essence defiled by the _thing _covering her with a death-shroud of otherworldly flame. "_I. Will. Kill. You," _Fenris snarled, lethal with promise.

The tongues of flame abruptly winked out. The intruder's gaze snapped away from his victim and widened. He stood, feathered pauldrons bristling as a stricken expression of realization stole over his haggard features; his stubbled jaw dropped open in horror and he raked a hand through hair the color of sand. "Oh, _Maker_," he moaned. "I—"

And then, as though reality itself had blinked, he was simply—_gone_.

Fenris glared at the vacant space for a hard, frozen moment. The air around him seemed to choke on itself on its journey into his lungs; he clenched his hands into helpless fists and snarled in wordless, fundamental protest as he crouched at Erin's side. There was something obscene in the broken sprawl of her limbs, in the way her head limply rolled this way and that as he lifted her off the floor. Holding her was like trying to wrap his arms around a glacier. There was a chill in her that went far beyond mere absence of heat—a bone-deep, ravenous freeze that reached through the thick layers of wool and cotton for any source of warmth it could find. Air puffed weakly against his neck as he cradled her against his chest, and he trembled with relief so vast and fierce it felt like a storm come to a desert.

_Breathing. Alive. _

He tightened his grip and stood. Even carrying her, he reached the bathroom in a mere three steps. One-handed, he spun the knobs on either side of the faucet. Water began to roar into the bathtub. "Stay with me, _dulca_," he begged urgently. Her glasses clattered forlornly to the floor as he peeled her clothes off her with a series of awkward, laborious tugs; he winced in surprise at the sting of her frozen skin against his hands. Hot water soaked his sleeves to the elbows as he carefully lowered her into the bathtub. The ice-blue stain to her flesh immediately began to return to a healthier pink; with rapt attention he watched the surface of the water ripple with each shallow rise and fall of her chest.

Injuries, he could bear. The harshest punishments and humiliating indignities; countless wounds and the silent, insidious caress of the magic needed to heal them—he had endured it all and more. None was as bad as waiting for the sound of water rhythmically lapping at the edges of the tub, as Erin continued to breathe. Praying to hear it again, in the dread hush between breaths. And already planning his next step, if he _didn't_.

_This _was all that came of—_attachments_. It left a void, yawning wide and hungry within him at the thought of—of _moving on_. Of stepping over the threshold into her wide, open world—_without_ her. Of innumerable moments of _Erin_, of coffee and dinner and easy conversation, and knowing each one could be the _last _one.

_Deorum elysia, _what would he tell her family?

His head dropped into his palms of its own volition, and he drew in a single, ragged breath. _Please—_

The pattern broke. Erin's body jerked as if she were falling out of a dream, splashing water over the side of the tub. Her eyes popped open, and she frowned vaguely at her bared chest, modesty preserved only by a breast-band and smallclothes, blue-and-white check stark against her wet skin. Her gaze found him, unfettered by her spectacles and such a torture of relief he found in them Fenris had to look away. "You're awake," he grunted. _Thank you— _"That's—that's good."

Each unfamiliar twist of pain and confusion upon her face sent daggers spinning through the empty ache in his chest. She levered herself into a sitting position with one hand curled over the edge of the tub. The effort seemed to exhaust her, and she pressed her cheek to the hard plastic, eyes squeezed firmly shut.

_Can't see—she hates that._ He found her glasses and slid them onto her face; her damp hair was soft in his fingers as he brushed its tangles out of the way. One bright eye cracked open, shine dulled by hurt and fatigue, and yet she _still _tried to smile at him. "Y'know, if you wanted me naked—"

Affection burned, white-hot frustration and fury flashing as he clenched his fists. Magic and danger and unfathomable fear all negated the instant she opened her eyes, and he could not understand how she found it in her to _jest_. "Don't," he growled, in a tone that would hear no dissent. "Just _don't_." The terry-cloth snapped in his hands as he took a towel from the rack and stared stonily at her, prone in the bathtub. "Can you stand? Or do I have to dive in to get you?"

Steam obscured the withering glare she leveled at him, but he felt its heat nevertheless. Water ran in rivulets down her skin as she laboriously regained her footing. She braced herself with one hand on the wall and gingerly balanced her weight on one foot as she slowly lifted the other out of the water. Fenris dove forward, towel spread, as she stumbled. She flushed beneath her concentrated expression of detached amiability as he caught her. "My, aren't we in a snit," she sniffed primly. She pushed herself away from him, defiance carved into the faint lines at the corners of her eyes even as her mouth smiled. "Bad day at the office, dear?"

Her stubborn mockery nettled his senses like bee stings soaked in wine. She had warned him she knew of no other way to _be_, and he would have her _be_ no other way, but he was in _no mood _for her to _be_. No one, in his entire life of captivity and pain and hiding, had ever called him _dear_. "I said _don't_."

Her skin was reassuringly warm to the touch as he wrapped the towel around her shoulders. Warm and unmarked—to look at her one would never guess she had come under attack. But she moved as though every miniscule twitch pained her beyond anything she had ever endured before. And it _must_—what might it _feel _like, he wondered despairingly, to someone who had never before felt the touch of magic? Had no idea what it could _do_, what fires it could ignite in the blood until not even a scream was left. Had no defense—could not even fight back—

_My fault_.

He was loath to leave her. But her invisible wounds shouted a reproach, and staying beside her was unbearable. He whirled and stalked from the tiny bathroom in silence; he navigated the maze of books and papers and discarded clothes on the floor of her bedchamber. He pawed through the chest of drawers until he had a stack of neatly-folded, dry clothes in his hands. He set the bundle of clothes on the bathroom counter when he returned. Erin clutched the towel tighter around her shoulders as he reached for it. The steam had cleared from the lenses of her spectacles; the full measure of her obstinate glare knifed through him like jade and cold iron. "Don't," she said.

This was wrong—she sounded too much like _him_ and he would rather rip out his _own_ heart than see her bent and twisted with bitterness— "_Futis_." He broke away from her cold, uncompromising stare and for the second time, left her.

The sounds of disrobement on the other side of the shut door were too far apart. The strained silence was too obvious. Too _much_. Every particle in his body felt drawn tight as a bowstring. He paced through her small world like a caged animal, desperation and futile rage speeding his movements. The door of the wardrobe scraped open, spilling out clothing and all her assembled brilliant miscellanea. His armor squatted mockingly in the corner, a monument to everything he sought to escape—and couldn't. He gave it a vicious kick, and it toppled. Buckles and leather rattled; his discarded belt flopped like a dead snake across Erin's shoes and he very nearly screamed. His belt pouch fell open, dried leaves spilling over the carpet. The smell was jarringly familiar; he scooped up the debris and hurried into the kitchen. The red kettle began to boil on the stove as he crushed the leaves into her favorite mug. The steam curled through the air, thick and cloying as he poured the hot water over the crumbled fragments. He could do this—_had _to do this. But by the almost-silent weeping behind the bathroom door, it was not enough.

_He _was not enough.

Erin emerged from the bathroom, swiping her fingertips beneath her glasses. Fenris's expression tightened as he thrust the hot mug into her empty hands. She frowned into it, one eyebrow cocked in incomprehension. "Elfroot," he bit out. "I found some in my armor."

She blanched and shoved the mug back. She shuffled in unmistakably sullen silence into her cluttered bedchamber and climbed into her nest of impossibly soft covers. He followed, as much to guard against her collapse as because the thought of letting her out of his sight was nothing short of unbearable. "Elfroot isn't real," she insisted, voice muffled by the pale blue sheet.

He commandeered the luxurious chair from its place beside her desk. _Soft—she's too soft._ Exhaustion crumbled his anger into dust, and he raked a hand through his hair. "Just drink it," he groaned wearily, nodding at the mug he set on the table next to the bed. "I'm not supposed to be real, either."

Erin batted the covers away from her face and squinted first at him, then at the mug. She pressed her lips into a thin line of resignation and half-rose. For several tense moments, the only sound was that of brewed elfroot passing Erin's lips. Her eyes glazed and the empty cup dangled by the handle from her fingers. Her head lolled onto her pillow and he leaned forward to rescue her spectacles before they were bent out of shape. She blinked hard, trying to keep him in focus even as the elfroot did its work. "I don't understand," she yawned as she frowned at where she thought he was. "What happened? What's wrong?"

_You could have died. _But thiswas _Erin. _Half-senseless and hurting in ways magic alone could inflict and all she wanted was to _understand_. He closed his eyes against the puzzled frown he _knew_ she still wore and selected a book at random from her shelf. "Later," he lied as he returned to the chair. "Rest."

The air around him shifted. Warm fingers brushed across the back of his hand, as she held one hand out toward him in entreaty. He froze; her eyes were shut and he doubted she was aware of much of anything, anymore. "Don't be angry," she murmured, russet brows drawn together as her hand blindly searched for his.

His hand folded over the shapes of her fingers, warm and familiar and soft—_too soft, she's too soft— _"I'm not angry at you," he sighed. It felt like truth; at least as true as a moment spent beneath an exquisite sunrise as his mouth touched hers—but who believed in _that_, now? But her hand still fit in his like it always had—well and right and too good to let go of and he would _have _to let go, sooner or later, if he was to protect her—

Fenris propped the book open atop the bed, thumbing through the pages with one hand. His other he wrapped more firmly around Erin's, the better to feel her pulse tapping faintly against the inside of her wrist. "Sleep, _dulca_—I'll be here," he promised.

The words on the page before him began to blur as the night caught up with him. He fought it—warred against the urge to let his eyes drop closed with all the strength left to him. He needed to stay awake, alert. Needed to keep one finger on her heartbeat, needed to keep her hand safe in his. He needed her safe—needed her smiling. Needed her—needed—

_Impersonal hands spread oil across his bared shoulders. He bears it as he must—all part of the theater and the promise of punishment should he disappoint in any manner is enough to keep him still as the slick perfume rolls across the lyrium and the custom sarebaas collar slides heavily over his skin. Tonight is just for show; no armor but a white cloth tucked about his loins for modesty's sake and he bears it as he must, for Danarius expects this spectacle and the night drags on and the wine keeps flowing and the woman in spectacles flashes him a smile across the room like—_

"_So y'wanna get outta here?"_

_What he took at first to be a gown is only shirt and trousers, blue on blue and so strange and the bottle in her hand is papered with a bright yellow label that reads "Shiner" but that's not right—he's a slave, he can't read—he would swear she is taken with drink; her accented speech is so far gone from the clipped, arrogant sneer of the magisters surrounding him but her eyes are clear, clear and shining and she asks him again as—_

"_So y'wanna get outta here?"_

_ —the moldering walls of his decrepit manse begin to disintegrate and his armor feels as though just one piece is just a bit out of place but that's impossible, it was all designed _for him _and it all fit perfectly just a moment ago. Something hard raps against his door and he knows it's Hawke but She is still grinning at him, that wild, secret smile that he _needs_ to see, to understand and she asks him AGAIN but the knocking gets louder and that gorgeous smile begins to fade and he reaches for her, helpless in metal claws to do the one thing he wants more than anything in two impossible worlds but— "I know what I am," he cries, silently begging her to argue, like always—_

_She stands on tiptoe, one hand curling around his nape and pulling him inexorably down, down, down— "Some days," she whispers against his mouth, "I really don't think you do."_

_One touch and the bottle drops and shatters and he doesn't _understand_ and _wants _to and is _afraid _to but this is all there _is_—right?_

Wrong.

A whisper of touch breezed across the sensitive point of his ear. Fenris's body snapped awake, mind swiftly following as it recognized the hand it snatched from the air. He threaded his fingers through Erin's and relaxed the insistent little voice within him that screamed _danger_. "That tickles," he protested, thoughts and memories sluggish with sleep.

"Sorry," she apologized quietly. He cracked open one eye as the telltale sound of her glasses unfolding rattled through the morning hush. She pushed them into place with her offhand, and they sat crookedly on the bridge of her nose as she nodded at him. "That can't be comfortable."

Fenris raised his head from where it had fallen sometime during his night's vigil. He rolled the cramps from his neck and shoulders, letting the chair's cushioned back stretch the hours from the harder-to-reach places. "I manage," he assured her. Her color had much improved, he noted with no little relief, and some of the vitality had returned to animate her expression. "How do you feel?"

"Awful," she replied with ready honesty. "But alive."

Hesitantly Fenris raised his hand from where it rested on the bed and laid it atop her throat. Her pulse fluttered steadily against his palm, and he nodded in mute satisfaction. His hand dropped; he carefully smoothed a wrinkle in the disheveled bedclothes and drew in a deep breath. "We have much to discuss," he exhaled reluctantly.

"I know," Erin nodded resignedly and slowly fought her way to a sitting position. She dragged the sweater over her head and let it fall to the floor. She pressed her eyes shut, blanching in agony as she leaned against the wall behind her for several labored breaths. But she mustered a smile—that minute twitch in either corner of her mouth that was as much a part of her as was the color of her eyes or the texture of her hair. "D'you wanna start or should I?"

She spoke as if this were no more serious than a game of cards. It should not have been amusing, but an infinitesimal smirk stole across his features nonetheless. "Ladies first," he replied. He could not maintain his pretense of detached chivalry for long, however. Erin's busy hands trembled on their habitual erratic journey through the air around her as her narrative unfolded. She directed her gaze toward the ceiling, or to the downy coverlet bunched in her lap, or between Binx's ears as he leapt demandingly onto the bed—she looked anywhere she could but at him. "I fell and—and passed out," she finished. Fear shadowed the planes and contours of her face, yet she _still _tried to smile. "The next thing I remember after that is waking up in the tub. Maybe _you _should start with your sudden urge to see me naked," she teased him.

An embarrassed flush worked its way to the points of his ears as Fenris developed a sudden and all-consuming interest in the uneven speckles on the ceiling. "You were so _cold_," he struggled to explain. He shivered away the goosebumps that pricked over his skin at the memory. "I am sorry if—"

"Don't sweat it, babe," she hurried over his apology. For a moment she looked as though she might reach across the covers for his hand; instead she nervously she tugged her sleeves over her knuckles until only her fingertips were visible. "Just—what happened?"

Now it was his turn. He almost welcomed the familiar surge of hate as it mingled with the stranger memories of the fear, the _need_. "I could hear Scooter barking from the parking lot," he said tonelessly. "But then my markings—" His knuckles turned white as he clenched them into fists around the padded arms of the desk chair; his jaw felt locked into place as he forced himself to continue. "_Magic_," he spat. "The sort I'm used to. I could—_feel _it, coming from inside."

_And if I hadn't, you'd be dead._

He lurched to his feet. He kicked through the labyrinthine mess on her floor as he paced its length, impatiently shoving his hair out of his face. The storm of _ifs _and _maybes _swirled his thoughts into mud; only the fact of Erin's gaze, clear and very much, alive gave him the strength to keep going. "He was here. And yet he wasn't." The blunt ends of his fingernails dug into his palms as he spun end over end through the corridors of his memory, dark with guilt. Danger had come, and she'd faced it. _Alone_.

One thing was certain: the abomination was _dead_, should he ever see it again. "He looked at me—_saw_ me. He burned _through _you. And then he was gone." The clutter on the bookshelf rattled as he drove his fist into its side. The hardy wood thumped in protest and he drew away, knuckles stinging in reproach. Fenris held still and put his back to the small bedchamber. "I've been a _fool_," he snarled, as the silence threatened to burn down everything around him. He laced his fingers together in the small of his back, glaring through the window at a dawn that seemed like one more tawdry mockery. "A world without magic—I _knew _it was impossible."

_Run—_

"Oh, don't you _fucking _dare!" Erin exclaimed. Sheets rustled angrily behind him, and he whirled in surprise and rage as she clutched his arm for balance. He shook her off; undeterred, she leaned on one of the short bookshelves, fury darting through her pale eyes like lightning on ice. "Don't you _dare _start with the lonesome brooding _bullshit_, just because—"

_You could have _died. "Magic _kills_!" he roared over her. "It tortures, it maims, it did _this_! And _still _you do not understand!" His temper screamed to answer hers, itching and crawling through his markings until it burst through his rigid control in a blue-white flash of frustration. He shook his head as her gaze narrowed. "Magic is good for _nothing_."

She drew back from him as though he'd slapped her; the anger drained from her countenance, and she held herself tightly by the elbows. "Just yesterday you thought it might be," she said, and he felt her entire being withdraw from him as though in flight. She swept her bedraggled locks away from her face with one hand and fixed him with a cold glare of determination. "Know what?" she bit out. "Fine. Forget it."

_Forget—?_

Erin whirled away from him, spine erect as she left him at the window. "I'm making coffee," she snapped with conviction. "And then I'm gonna figure out what's goin' on . You can join me, or not." She should have been ridiculous, tossing a final, icy glare over her shoulder as she beat a graceless exit. "Your choice."

_Obstinate. Magnificent. _The bookshelf made a sympathetic _thunk_ as he dropped his head against it. Her anger danced in the wake of her retreat like motes of dust through sunlight. The jarring whine of the coffee grinder smashed through the tense silence; Fenris savagely reined in the urge to follow her, even as all the hidden places within him still frozen in hate and rage began to reluctantly thaw in admiration. She would do it, too—she would puzzle out the entire tapestry of the universe, did he leave her to it. Something dropped to the floor in the other room with a heavy thud; alarm and instinct found a flawless synchronization as he left her bedroom.

She lay on the kitchen floor in a crumpled heap, the angles of her body contorted awkwardly until she resembled one of the strange symbols in her books and breathing as though she had only recently discovered the habit. She jerked reflexively away from him as he stepped over her to finish preparing the coffee she'd started. "This would be easier if you weren't in the way," he muttered.

Poison coated the flippant retort she threw back at him, and he slammed down the lid to the coffee maker with a hot burst of renewed temper. "Enough," he snapped with finality. "For once, spare me your quips and just _hear_ me."

She fell silent, gaze cold and hard as gemstones as he folded into a sitting position beside her. His skin prickled under her unbroken stare, raising a thousand tiny spectres of things best forgotten. Things he needed to remember, if he hoped to survive. "I miss the weight of a sword in my hand," he admitted quietly. "And I miss knowing, with absolute certainty, how the world around me _works_.

"I _hated_ my life," he snarled. If she would hear nothing else, by all the gods she would understand that much if he had to tattoo it onto her flawless, pale skin. "But at least it wouldn't _change_." The coffee pot beeped a timid interruption; he rested the back of his head against the cabinet and sighed. "I haven't had to be what I am," he continued softly. "Not here. It's been—like a dream," he whispered. He closed his eyes, hoping to escape the barrage of recent memories, only to be assailed by them. Coffee with Erin. Ice cream with Erin. Erin laughing—Erin throwing the Frisbee—Erin reading a book— _Erin, Erin Erin— _"But I _am_ what I am—to try to be anything else is folly. And it nearly got you killed." Last night's choking rage burned out into ashes that sat in the pit of his stomach with a cold, futile feeling. "If I had been here instead of doodling on some drunkard's ass cheeks—"

"Seriously? _That's_ your argument?" Erin drawled, incredulity dripping from each exaggerated syllable. Her palm slapped roughly against the floor as she pushed herself into a sitting position. "It's your fault I was hurt because you were _working_?" 

"_I don't know what I'm doing!_" Fenris lurched to his feet, fist clenched around a phantom sword hilt as the confession tore from his throat. He barely resisted the urge to hurl every mug in her cabinet against the wall in frustration, as he fetched down two cups. The handle of the sugar spoon was a poor substitute for the weapon he craved—for the solace he had always found upon the edge of his blade. Glass and metal knocked together angrily; yesterday's single kiss seemed like a far-away thing indeed. He had lingered here too long—had fallen into the trap laid by his own starved senses. Had allowed himself to be lulled into a relaxation more dangerous than any mindless boredom or drunken apathy. Had allowed himself to believe, for one moment of bliss purer than anything he had ever known, felt or found, he could be _more _than what he _was_. 

And yet— 

_Erin. Protect. _

_Run—_

"I'm not running," Fenris ground out from behind clenched teeth. He braced himself against the edge of the countertop and stared aimlessly into the gleaming depths of the metal sink. "I should be, but I'm not. Tell me why," he demanded. 

Erin's neck bent at an awkward angle as she frowned at him from her seat. "I can't read your mind, babe—" 

"But you _know _me, do you not?" he retorted, almost desperately. "So—" 

"I know you're an insufferable _grouch_," she interrupted with hot impatience. "You like spicy food and you put fucking _peanut butter_ on pizza last week just to see if it'd taste good. Which it didn't," she reminded him with a touch of smugness. She began ticking points off on her fingertips as her recitation continued, as her expression grew more agitated and she listed _things _about him no one but she would know— 

"Enough!" he finally shouted, unable to stand any more. Coffee splashed over the counter's surface as he roughly shoved the pot back into its niche in the machine. "_Venhedis_, woman—" 

She ignored him. "I _don't_ know you," she argued insistently. "I don't know why you're not running any more than you do. And I don't know what _I'm _doing either!" Fenris stared, dumbfounded, as temper crackled in fits and starts within the depths of her gaze; the defiant thrust of her chin trembled with a twist of pain and fear he was startled to recognize—for he faced it every day. "Up until a month ago I knew _exactly_ how my life worked," Erin continued. "How it was _always _going to work. And the _only _thing that's kept me from completely losing my shit on a daily basis is knowing—_hoping _I'm not alone." She kicked at the cabinets in front of her in an attempt to stand, only to wince and sink back to the floor as her body betrayed her. 

_Idiot_. Of _course _her fears mirrored his—how could they not? "Oh for—come here." Gingerly Fenris drew her arms around his neck; his hands formed a broken circle around her waist as he lifted her to her feet and clasped her against him. Her heartbeat tapped faintly against his black cotton shirt, like the faraway call of some distant drum. "_Venhedis, _woman, you're exhausting," he sighed with grudging affection. 

Erin dangled limply in his grasp, blue stockings lightly brushing the floor. Her voice was muffled against his shirt as she sullenly replied, "Yeah, well, you're no picnic yourself." He sensed her expression draw into a perplexed frown, cheek pillowed on his shoulder, as he continued to hold her. "What are you doing?" 

"Choosing." 

Fenris brought his mouth down hard upon hers, forging heedlessly onward before he lost his nerve. No tentative brush of a hesitant swain, this. He poured every half-second of the night's anxious vigil across her lips; he roughly coaxed her mouth open and let her taste his frustration and worry and _fear_ with an exploratory flick of her tongue against his. Her grip tightened—the fabric of his shirt stretched as she dragged him closer, as she kissed him back in savage reassurance. Every cell and fiber still possessed of older instincts raged in protest, a scattered mob that screamed to be heard over the dull roar of blood pumping in his ears and the curl of pleasure as Erin's kiss subtly softened. She broke away and blinked at him with such strange, stubborn _hope _it _hurt_. 

Fenris exhaled shakily and touched his brow to hers. He needed proximity. He needed touch. His obfuscated memory held more of _running _than of anything else, and it wearied him beyond recounting. He'd run so far, and so fast, never daring to look behind him for fear of what he might find and never bothering to look ahead, reasoning that _running _was enough. And without even realizing it, he'd finally run _into _something—some_one_ that made him want to _stop_. 

_Erin. Home._

She was still staring at him, searching his face with a cross-eyed intensity that brought a small smile to his lips. _This—I choose _this_._ "Where do we start?" he whispered. 

"I'd say we just did," she quipped instantly. She wriggled politely in a bid for freedom and limped energetically into the living room, leaving his arms empty. She nudged patiently at her brown satchel with her foot until her notebook slid free; this she kicked toward the sofa and took her seat with a determinedly-stifled groan of relief. Fenris started after her, coffee in hand and fully prepared to shepherd her back to her rest even if he had to haul her over his shoulder like a sack of vegetables, but she rallied before he could move to do so. She lifted the notebook into her lap and fished a pencil from the depths of the lampstand beside the couch. She patted the cushion beside her in unambiguous invitation, and grinned in delight when he joined her. "Okay, so—" 

They spent the morning thus, passing her notebook back and forth across their laps and scribbling down rapid-fire nonsense Erin promised would make sense—eventually. Fenris watched her carefully, all his observational senses tuned to signs of her fatigue. When her eyelids drooped and she leaned against the back of the sofa to fend off periodic waves of dizziness, he took the notebook from her and committed her spoken words to paper in his own uncertain hand. When she yawned so widely her jaw snapped in protest, he filled her bright blue mug with fresh coffee and returned it to her already prepared with cream and sugar. And when she shivered, still racked with phantom chills, he slid his arm about her shoulders and let it rest there. Erin seemed to draw strength from the gesture; she reached for his hand and pulled him more tightly around her as she would a cloak, smiling shyly at him from the corner of her eye. Fenris only touched his forehead to hers in silent encouragement, and peered over the top of her head while her free hand continued to scatter ideas across the notebook's lined pages. 

Time, however, was against them. Fenris glanced uneasily at the clock, willing the march of its hands to slow—even better, to stop altogether. But the painted swirls and brass pendulum refused to accommodate his fervent desires. "Back to bed with you," he declared abruptly, as the hour neared when he must depart for the shop. 

Erin cocked one eyebrow at him. "Geez, buy a girl a drink first," she drawled, lashes dropping coyly to disguise a very real challenge. "Why?" 

He stood and held out his hand. "Because you are going nowhere _near _this room until I return," he stated bluntly. 

"It's a six-hundred square foot _box_," she pointed out. "Not _even _six hundred. More like five-eighty. _Everywhere _is 'near this room'." But she allowed him to lift her to her feet and lead her back into the bedchamber. 

He steered her onto the bed, and she sat cross-legged in the center of the mattress. "You do not move from this spot," he said sternly. "I want your word." 

"Oh now that's just—" 

"Your _word_, Erin Campbell," Fenris raised his voice over her mulish protests. "Or I do not budge." 

She folded her arms across her chest and fixed him with a level, uncompromising glare. "I'm not waiting around for _twelve hours _just for you to get back," she argued. "I want bathroom breaks, at least." 

The elf mirrored her posture—somewhat more impressive since he was standing and she was not. "Fine," he agreed, conceding the point. "I have your word, then?" 

She drew in a deep breath. Every line and contour of her body practically vibrated with instinctive, stubborn resistance. But she nodded, chin dipping a fraction as she met his gaze without flinching. "You have my word," she promised.

He smirked. "Careful you don't choke, _dulca_," he chuckled by way of farewell. 

_Insufficient_. Halfway to the front door he turned, and poked his head back into the bedroom. She was bouncing up and down in her seat, staring at nothing and a pensive, bored look on her face. "Thank you," he called softly, and was gone before she could reply. 

The day _crawled_. Fenris pondered in bewildered irritation the universal phenomenon that accelerated or slowed time, in direct opposition to individual desire. No matter how he argued with himself that he was simply imagining it, that it was only his worry for Erin that dragged the day out beyond its due allotment, he could not shake the sensation that time itself was mocking him. Even Mark noticed, one dark eyebrow raised in inquiry as the former warrior repeated his cycle of chores with all the nervous enthusiasm of a dog chasing after its tail. The sun submitted only reluctantly to the pull of the horizon, dragging the shroud of night behind it like a cart missing a wheel. Starlight twinkled coldly overhead; the moon cast its silver shadow across the cloudless sky and _still _closing time felt no closer than when the day first began. Perhaps he could sweep the floor again— 

A single, booming chime shivered from the heights of the clock tower in the town square. Fenris tucked the broom away with brisk, efficient movements and dipped his chin to his employer on his way out the door. Anxiety spurred his customary loping walk to a long-legged trot. He hardly noticed the changing textures of the ground beneath his feet as he followed the now-familiar shortcut along the river's shores. He forced himself to check his speed as he drew closer to the small courtyard, to give every shadowed corner the full measure of his experienced scrutiny before pressing onward. There was no light coming from the living room, no Erin reading a book on the sofa or combing through endless forests of paper with a pen in her hand. Only the darkness, and a slight twitch of the white curtains as one of the cats abandoned its perch in the windowsill. 

How _wrong _that darkness seemed. Fenris caught himself holding his breath as he turned his borrowed key in Erin's lock and pushed through the empty living room. A sliver of yellow light a hand's span across sliced through the night, and he followed its trail into her bedroom— 

—and walked straight into a stack of books easily as tall as he was. 

Erin glanced up from the haphazard sheets of notes spread across the surface of her mattress, and smiled distractedly. "Oh good, you're home," she greeted him sweetly. 

Fenris gaped at the chaos, gingerly picking his path so as not to disturb anything else. Everything felt balanced upon a knife's point of perfection, held in stasis as it awaited a catalyst. The shelves were emptied; precarious towers of books were stacked in neat, precise spirals to resemble twisting staircases. The tower he'd knocked over lay in broken shambles across the carpet, for once free of discarded clothes. The clutter of portraits and mementos had been arranged on their steps like tiny effigies of people, traveling up and down the winding paper spires. Paper birds in various stages of completion dangled from the blades of her ceiling fan, whirring gently overhead so they appeared to be flying. Boredom, it would seem, suited her roughly as well as it did him. 

"_Ira deorum_, woman, what in the Void possessed you?" Fenris wondered, biting back a startled laugh. 

"Forgot my laptop in the other room before you left," she explained, "and since I'd promised to stay in here—" She trailed off with a shrug of one shoulder, as if to say the ensuing frenzy couldn't be helped. 

An unfamiliar tightness squeezed through Fenris's chest. All this—just for the sake of a promise. And not one she'd given freely, but that he'd extorted. But she'd _kept _it, nonetheless. 

Unfamiliar. But not unwelcome. 

"Now for the fun part," Erin continued with relish. She picked up a coin from the corner of her dresser and flicked it with expert precision at one of the book-towers. It hit a corner of one spine, and the whole thing crashed to the floor. "Jenga!" she exclaimed, arms thrown into the air with childish glee. 

He shook his head, struck by the sense of helpless amusement the spectacle gave him, and picked up a second coin. "Scoot over," he ordered companionably. 

Erin's answering grin seemed to split her face in two, as she made room atop the unmade bed. He was careful not to sit too near; it was one thing to embrace her, to hold her against him on the sofa. Quite another to do so upon a bed. He leaned against the wall, legs casually crossed at the ankles, and turned the coin over in his fingers. Paper crinkled beneath him as he took his seat, and he glanced at the scattered sheets covered with precise equations and deliberately-cramped notes in the margins. "Anything—ah—" he tried to ask. 

Erin fixed him with an amused, knowing look. "Strange?" she supplied. "Untoward? Spooky?" 

"_Dangerous_," he interrupted exasperatedly. 

"Aside from the soul-crushing boredom?" she persisted in teasing him for a moment longer. She soon sobered under his fierce glare. "Nothing," she answered, soothingly. "Not that I noticed, anyway." 

Fenris relaxed; he snapped the coin from between his thumb and index finger and managed to knock one spire of her city of books into another. She flapped her hands at him when he moved to help her return order; he recognized the same pent-up energy that had plagued him all day as she busily rearranged her books and trinkets upon the shelves. With his return as permission, she darted freely through the apartment; she retrieved her laptop and immediately began transcribing the sheaves of notes she'd written in his absence. He eyed her critically, noting with satisfaction that the combined efforts of the elfroot and the enforced bed rest had done their work. Which turned out to be a double-edged blade, for while the full measure of Erin's scattered, cheerful vitality had returned, she also clearly had no intention of _stopping _anytime soon. 

Fenris kept his seat at the foot of the bed. His thoughts turned inward, into the wellspring of affection that seemed constantly brimming within him. Exhaustion mingled freely with nervous excitement and that surprising, stubborn drop of lust that, since their strange kiss of rough and tender passion that morning, had proven more and more difficult to sublimate. He shook his head to clear it of the invasive whispers of _wrong_; he was _staring_, as he so often had caught _her _staring at _him_, and the realization stung as if he'd inched too close to a fire on a night of bitter cold. 

He offered no embrace, when he said a stiff goodnight. Erin's hands paused for a fraction of a second in their dance across the laptop's keys. She rose from her chair and drew slowly closer; she did not rise to her toes and wrap her arms around his neck, as was their recent custom, but instead only reached for his hand, which he gave. She squeezed briefly. "'Night, babe," she murmured quietly. 

From beneath his confusion came the sincere hope she never intended to make her way as a gambler. Her every thought was plain upon her face, proclaimed across the smooth cheeks and earnest brow as clearly as though written there. She wished to come even nearer, but would not. 

Unless— 

He cupped his free hand around her nape and gently pulled. Her forehead bumped against the pad of his shoulder, and he held her there for just a moment before slipping away to find his rest. He pulled his bed from within the sofa, half-asleep before his head even touched the pillow, and was ushered into dreams by the sound of Erin's fingers upon the keys, drumming the beat of the universe. 

That same sound woke him, so gradually that he wasn't certain he'd slept at all. A quick glance at the pale glow of dawn peeking through the living room window told him otherwise. Fenris muffled a resigned groan with his pillow, before he dragged his shirt over his head and half-rolled, half-rose from his bed. It was not intended as a signal, but the door to Erin's bedchamber swung open nonetheless. She was already dressed for the day, jeans and t-shirt molding themselves to her silhouette as she scraped her hair into a short, bristly tail. She flashed him an apologetic grin on her way into the kitchen; almost immediately, strong coffee began to gurgle busily into the glass pitcher. She hardly paused to attach Scooter's lead to her collar before bustling out the front door. 

Fenris sighed and slowly went about putting the living room back to rights. It was going to be one of _those _mornings. 

He was adding a third spoonful of sugar to his own cup—Erin's was already waiting for her—when she returned. At a glance he could tell her thoughts were already aflame: she hardly touched her coffee and when he finally woke up enough to properly look at her she bolted straight away for her bedroom to fetch her laptop, and the day's work began. Erin danced precariously across the sofa cushions as she affixed their notes from the previous day to the wall with strips of tape. She wrote out strings of her arcane symbols across sheets of gridded paper and attached them to strange maps of her world splattered with green and red swirls. She tried explaining as she went; her obvious enthusiasm made it difficult to follow any but the most basic words, the shape of her lips around _t-test _and _regression_. Fenris helped her up and down and up again, and tried not to think about how well his palm _fit _into the curve between the bottom of her ribs and the top of her waist. 

She flatly refused to be confined to her room again, when it came time for him to leave for work. Before he could even muster an argument—or bodily carry her back to her bed—she had pointed out he'd felt safe enough to sleep the night before, and shooed him out the door with a fresh cup of coffee. He seethed. He cursed her for a vexatious, obstinate fool. And her face _still_ found its way onto his meticulously-drawn copies. His pencil traced her perplexed frown almost of its own volition. His fingertip smudged the contours of her fierce glare and beautiful determination and he heaved an impatient sigh at his inability to capture the perfect spark of temper that was more than a match for his— 

Fenris crumpled the incomplete sketch in his fist and tossed it to the floor. _Infuriating woman_. 

No matter his frustration with her, his certainty that forces beyond their comprehension were at work and the helpless knowledge she would not rest until she understood them, his relief was a mighty thing indeed when he returned home and found everything more or less as it should be. No darkened windows awaited him, no wary stillness in which anything might lurk. There was only Erin, reclining on the sofa and frowning into the faint glow emanating from her laptop screen, illuminated in turn by the lamp beside the sofa. She returned his tentative embrace warmly, with an easy smile that did not quite conceal the spectre of worry haunting the depths of her gaze, the corners of her mouth. And if he squeezed his arms around her waist more tightly than usual, held on for just a moment longer than normal—well. Nothing about this was _normal_, in _any _sense of the word. 

Still, normal or not, he couldn't shake the foreboding chill that tickled malignantly at the top of his spine when Erin cast quick, sharp glances at the plain black box squatting beside the television. He could not dispel his shiver of unease as she reluctantly explained her idea, and the troubled thoughts behind it. He could not so easily dismiss the maelstrom of fear that ate at his resolve and made nightmares where there had been none.

She wished to return to Kirkwall. And because she was brilliant, because he trusted her in spite of the obvious fact she was mad and because he would sooner break bread with the Archon himself than let her face the City of Chains alone—because of the way her mouth had felt beneath his and because against every dictate of survival he _cared _for her, Fenris would follow.

He'd thought nothing could compare to the strange, debilitating terror of realizing the world was not all one thought it was. He thought he knew pain. He thought he knew madness.

He'd been wrong.

The weirdest agonies ripped through him, as he watched his rendered self play out his memories across the screen. Old scars tore open. His sword arm ached with strain even though it had been weeks since he'd held a blade. His moments of solitary torment were laid bare for her scrutiny and pleasure. Fenris clung to her shoulders; he hid his face in the shelter of her neck, unable to stand any but the briefest glances as she dragged him through Kirkwall's dirty streets and bent populace. But never once did she mock him. Somehow, that made everything _worse_—that out of everything they had come through together, _this _was the one thing even Erin could find no humor in. She tucked herself against him, hands occupied with the oblong remote that controlled the actions of those onscreen with invisible puppet strings. Her lips pressed into a thin line, as though to contain every outcry against reason and reality; he thought he could count on one hand the number of times she blinked as she stared at the players—his _companions_. _Himself_.

He did not know whether to be grateful for the reprieve, when she called for a pause after sundown, or angry at the delay. His protests could not withstand the eloquent skepticism contained in arch of her delicate brow, nor the telling grumble of his empty stomach. Scooter trotted happily between them, oblivious, as they made their way to the center of town. The scent of _food_ reached them long before the food-carriages came into view. Fenris exchanged his paper currency for a meal of _tacos_—cooked meat, rice and vegetables all folded into a round of flat bread—and joined Erin at one of the many wooden tables scattered throughout the food-park.

He schooled his expression into the blank mask that had always served him well as a slave, and afterward. He forced himself to remain calm as Erin plucked the pieces of marinated chicken from her bowl with a set of reed-thin sticks she dexterously manipulated with her fingertips. He knew, as he _knew _her, that she relished these scant moments to separate herself from the ceaseless churning of her thoughts, to concern herself with nothing at all beyond _right now_; he also knew that if he did not wrest some sort of conversation from her, _right now_, he would run mad into the busy street to meet his doom at whatever hands saw fit to grant it to him. "How is this possible?" he demanded. "Any of it?"

Erin frowned at him. "You know I don't know," she reminded him, half-apologetically.

"I have spent an entire day watching my _life _unfold at _your _hands," he said, more sharply than he intended to. "My life, which is also a story—" _one of _Varric's _stories, no less_— "which is also—what? A toy?"

"It's a whole new level of weird," she admitted after a moment's heavy silence. "Even for us." Though he could not see her face clearly in the dim light cast by the street lamps, he could well imagine her sympathetic frown as she clacked her eating-sticks together. "Are you okay?"

The perfect absurdity of the question coaxed a short chuckle from him, humorless though it was. "No," he replied succinctly. "Just—just tell me there is a point to all this?" he pleaded quietly.

"There is—I think," she answered, though she didn't appear as though she'd quite convinced herself. "It's kind of a crackpot idea, but if your being _here_ changes anything _there_, maybe it'll show up somehow."

She gesticulated vaguely in the direction of the apartment, where they both knew loomed the shadow of something much larger. And much more dangerous. "And if it doesn't?" he pressed.

She offered an unconcerned, one-shouldered shrug. "Negative results are still results. If the gameplay doesn't change, we can close that line of inquiry and open new ones."

He caught a glimpse of her expression as they passed under a street light. A smile curled across her lips, and her eyes were bright with an excitement he'd seen only when she was at her most fanatic in pursuit of some esoteric goal. "You're _enjoying _this," he realized, and was left stunned by the shockwave of betrayal that curdled the contents of his stomach.

Erin half-turned toward him, pale hand clenching into a fist around Scooter's leash. Her mouth worked soundlessly, and he watched angrily as several different thoughts tried to complete themselves behind her eyes. Her shoulders finally slumped in defeat; she thrust both hands into her pockets and met his accusing glare without a trace of artifice. "Yeah, okay—I am," she admitted baldly. Her expression was calm—even solemn, as she added, "But not for the reasons you're afraid of."

He crossed his arms across his chest, silently daring her to continue. "Which are _what_, exactly?"

She didn't hesitate. "You're afraid I get off on this. Playing God," she clarified, noting his look of incomprehension. "Playing with the lives of people you _knew_." No hint of mockery, no gloating smile marred her features as she paused to search his face. "But that's not it," she assured him. "I'm enjoying this because even though the situation is fucked up—and I mean _fucked up_," she laughed, even though it wasn't funny, "I'm back in my element. Doing research. Finding answers. I'm _good _at it," she asserted without conceit. "It's nice to be doing what I'm good at, for once."

He mulled over her words as they walked. To his surprise, he believed her—he believed in her need for an answer, easily as great as his. More than that, he believed in her ability to _find _one—and once she did, he believed she would know what to _do_ with it, as surely as he owned a thought in his head. It was no small thing, he knew, to believe in _her_, in the truth of her character, before a situation arose in which that newfound trust could be put to the test.

That did not mean he was required to _like _it.

"Can I ask you something?" Erin hesitantly intruded into his thoughts.

"Is it possible to stop you?" he shot back.

There was a telling silence, as she considered whether that was permission or a warning. "What were you doing on the Wounded Coast in the first place?" she eventually decided to ask. "Y'know, before you ended up here?"

He cocked a skeptical eyebrow, unseen in the wavering dark between streetlamps. "Why is _that _important?"

She fished in her pocket for her keys as they approached the courtyard. "It'll give me an idea of when to stop—_listen_," she huffed in sudden exasperation. Her hand snaked into the crook of his elbow, and she tugged gently until she had his attention. "If I could make this _less weird_, I would," she promised earnestly. "You have to know that."

An easy vow, and ultimately an empty one. There was no way to make what was previously impossible a reality without also transforming reality into something almost intolerably bizarre. Fenris extricated himself from her grip with gentle insistence and pushed his way into the apartment without replying. Covertly he watched her as he put together a fresh pot of coffee. She perched cross-legged atop the coffee table and alternating her focus between the mural of notes affixed to the wall and the sleek box containing the game disc. She chewed her bottom lip, frowning hard as she leaned her weight backward on the heels of her hands. He considered all he knew of her, reviewing every moment of the last month with brutal scrutiny. Flippant. Obstinate. Possessed of a temper, though she tried to conceal it—never successfully, to his mind. But within her was an untempered courage unlike any he'd ever known—one that had faced down repeated onslaughts to sanity with a quiet smile of acceptance. Whatever her faults, never would Fenris name cruelty among them.

"It started as an ordinary day," he began, while the coffee maker did its work. Erin turned on her seat, listening with an attentive solemnity that ill suited her gamine features. "They always did. Hawke asked me to accompany her on some errand. Do you know, I didn't even care what it was," he admitted. "_Anything _to get out of that—that shithole, as you call it." He stirred sugar into two mugs and added cream to hers. "The Viscount wanted one thing, the Arishok another, and somehow we ended up on the Wounded Coast, pinned down by marauders with some of the city guard. And then—" He shrugged helplessly as he finished, waving a hand at the sofa that had become his bed. "You know the rest."

He was all at once relieved and fearful of the glimmer of recognition that passed over her face. She gently blew on the coffee he passed to her and smiled for the first time all day. "_That_,I can work with," she assured him, her grin almost cocky as she took her seat beside him on the sofa. She picked up the black handpiece, attention solely on him for a moment more. "You still with me, babe?"

He chose to focus on the texture of her hair beneath his cheek, as he leaned against her for support. Her familiar scent wrapped its tendrils around his senses as he nodded, one arm curled intimately around her torso. "Somehow I doubt I'll like the Deep Roads any better the second time," he deadpanned.

It was easier, this time—though only a fraction. He was still unable to _watch _for much of the expedition; however, bolstered by the coffee and the solid warmth of Erin's back against his side, he was able to listen without wanting to crawl into a hole and draw a boulder over the opening. He trembled throughout the entirety of the battle with the ancient rock wraith, remembering in merciless detail how hot and how fiercely the strange red lyrium had made his markings _shriek _in protest—how much it had _hurt_. 

Erin knew—he _knew _she knew. There was a desperation in the sound of her fingers upon the controller's buttons that hadn't been there before, as if she sought to hurry through this to spare him as much pain as was possible. She guided the puppet-Fenris along the safest course she could manage, until it was over and she could let the controller rest atop the coffee table for a moment. "Fuck this," she exclaimed with feeling. She rose, and like she had the night they'd met, retrieved the bottles of potent liquor from the cabinets above the refrigerator. Ice clinked against glass; liquid sloshed from the bottle and she brought back two glasses of a pale green drink that tasted much like his first encounter with tequila and lime. In silent accord they raised their glasses in a toast to one another and gulped down the sweet-toxic mixture without pausing for breath. She swayed on her feet, and he slid an arm around her waist to steady her. "Has anyone ever told you you can't hold your drink?" he asked as he pulled her against him. 

"Loads of times," she replied, tipping her head back to better keep him in focus. "Want another one?"

His lips tingled, though whether from the alcohol or from the barely-suppressed urge to kiss her once more, he could not properly tell. He gazed at her face, at the shape of her eyes and the uncertain bow of her mouth as she stared back into him. He _should_ kiss her, he knew—but could not. Not when such a kiss may mean a parting, instead of a greeting. So he only nodded, and let her slip from his grasp to prepare such poisons as she may. He half-heard the familiar voices, repeating conversations and arguments he'd only barely attended to the first time around. To his way of thinking, it was much more important that he remember what it _felt_ like, to have Erin's heartbeat nestled against his, to memorize the number of times Scooter turned in a circle before she laid at their feet. From the corner of his eye he saw Hawke, miniaturized to fit on the television's malleable stage, make her way down the paths of the Wounded Coast with her companions—and him—in tow. Panic rose in his throat in great, heaving swells. How different might his life have been, he wondered, if he had simply told Hawke _no_? And how could he return now, when that _yes _had led him _here_?

There was still _so much—_

"Blue," he broke the tense silence decisively. "Deep sky blue."

Erin's cheek brushed his as she turned to stare at him. "Come again?"

"My favorite color is deep sky blue," he explained hurriedly. "And in retrospect I should have listened to you about the peanut butter." He struggled to find a word—_any _word that would let her know that _this_ had been his choice, even if whatever mysterious phenomenon that had brought him here unraveled and dragged him back to Kirkwall kicking and screaming. He found none. Perhaps one didn't exist. All he knew was that the moment was upon them, that this might be his last chance to experience the particular scent and texture of her hair against his cheek, and he nodded at the television. "That's it," he said flatly. "That's the ambush." 

Erin knocked back what remained in her glass. He stared hungrily at her mouth, wondering if the same illogic that broke enchantments might also seal them—but then she was too far away. "Showtime," she growled. She curled one hand around his wrist and squeezed tightly. "Hang in there, babe," she urged him. "We're almost done." 

With ruthless efficiency she directed her puppets' actions. A hard, brittle mask descended over her soft features like a thundercloud. Fenris couldn't watch. He squeezed his eyes shut and listened hard for any change, any indication that his surroundings might dissolve around him as swiftly as they had materialize. Dread thoughts took root and refused to be dislodged, as the noises of battle intensified with memory. He was dead. He was dreaming. He was mad. 

"_Anyone need healing?"_

He was back. _No—no nononono!_

"_Remind me never to get on our bad side. Seems to be—_unhealthy_."_

Fenris stifled a bestial growl of pain more acute than any he'd known. Of loss. Of grief. Of such terrible rage as might consume the first thing it touched— 

"Um—Fenris?" 

The elf's eyes flew open. He inhaled shallowly, cautiously taking stock of the soft material pillowing his cheek. Hair. Human hair. He took another deep breath, and nearly staggered beneath the weight of the truth of his surroundings. 

"Not that I object on principle," Erin continued, "but could you maybe loosen up a little? Girl's gotta breathe, y'know." 

_He was home. _

"I'm—still here," he realized. He cast a furtive glance at the television screen before him, and his bewilderment increased tenfold. "I'm still here, and I'm still _there_." 

Erin's gaze sharpened attentively. She turned the puppet-Hawke in circles, tracking the movements of her followers—including him—with focus any bird of prey might envy. She wiggled out from under his arm and leaned forward intently. She thumbed the sticks on the controller with rigid precision, sending the small group on-screen thither and yon for another quarter of an hour before she declared an end to the experiment. She turned to him then with a grin as triumphant and relieved as it was exhausted, and he thought it might be the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. "So what now?" she asked invitingly. Her smile broadened, seeming to span the entirety of her face. "Bacon and toast?" 

Fenris didn't hesitate. "Old Gods, yes." 

He tugged her against him, and she slipped her arms around his neck without fear. He closed his eyes against a wave of dizziness as a hot and tight sensation constricted fiercely within his chest. His hands molded to the slope of her back and that wellspring of affection burst open as he surrendered a part of himself into her keeping. It didn't matter; _this _was where he belonged. Right here, right now. 

_Kiss de girl—_

Remembrance jolted through her, and she pulled away slightly. He might have kissed her right then, had she not been smiling that wild, secret thing that spoke to all the things in her wide, mad world he had not yet seen, but soon would. "Hey, speaking of deep sky blue," she began mischievously. 

He listened raptly, as she wove a tale of flying ships and a house by the sea countless leagues away. Life, it would seem, was full of surprises. 

And he could not wait to sample each one.


End file.
